Quotes about earth
page 3

Jerry Spinelli photo
Jim Butcher photo
Jimmy Carter photo
Malcolm X photo
Julian of Norwich photo

“If any such lover be in earth which is continually kept from falling, I know it not: for it was not shewed me. But this was shewed: that in falling and in rising we are ever preciously kept in one Love.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Sixteenth Revelation, Chapter 82
Context: If any such lover be in earth which is continually kept from falling, I know it not: for it was not shewed me. But this was shewed: that in falling and in rising we are ever preciously kept in one Love. For in the Beholding of God we fall not, and in the beholding of self we stand not; and both these be sooth as to my sight. But the Beholding of our Lord God is the highest soothness. Then are we greatly bound to God that He willeth in this living to shew us this high soothness. And I understood that while we be in this life it is full speedful to us that we see both these at once. For the higher Beholding keepeth us in spiritual solace and true enjoying in God; that other that is the lower Beholding keepeth us in dread and maketh us ashamed of ourself. But our good Lord willeth ever that we hold us much more in the Beholding of the higher, and leave not the knowing of the lower, unto the time that we be brought up above, where we shall have our Lord Jesus unto our meed and be fulfilled of joy and bliss without end.

W.B. Yeats photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“The earth has a skin and that skin has diseases; one of its diseases is called man.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist
Rainer Maria Rilke photo
W.B. Yeats photo

“The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

Letter to the Editor, Dublin Daily Express (27 February 1895)

Bob Marley photo

“Some people say great God come from the sky take away everything and make everybody feel high, but if you know what life is worth, you will look for yours on earth.”

Bob Marley (1945–1981) Jamaican singer, songwriter, musician

Get Up, Stand Up (cowritten with Peter Tosh), from the album Burnin (1973)
Song lyrics

Nikos Kazantzakis photo
Vincent Van Gogh photo
Andy Andrews photo
Paulo Coelho photo
Stephen Hawking photo

“Time and space are finite in extent, but they don't have any boundary or edge. They would be like the surface of the earth, but with two more dimensions.”

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author

Source: Black Holes and Baby Universes

Robert Browning photo

“Take away love, and our earth is a tomb!”

"Fra Lippo Lippi, line 54.
Men and Women (1855)
Variant: Without love, our earth is a tomb

Elizabeth Cady Stanton photo
Al Gore photo
John Berger photo
Karen Blixen photo

“Perhaps he knew, as I did not, that the Earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road.”

As quoted in obituaries (7 September 1962)
Variant: God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.
Source: Out of Africa

Henry David Thoreau photo

“Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist
Aldo Leopold photo
Sadhguru photo
Cassandra Clare photo
Kenneth E. Hagin photo
Eugene O'Neill photo
Katherine Mansfield photo

“Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.”

Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) New Zealand author

Source: Journal entry (14 October 1922), published in The Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927)

Thich Nhat Hanh photo

“The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Touching Peace (1992), p. 1. Parallax Press ISBN 0-938077-57-0
Variant: The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive.
Source: Touching Peace: Practicing the Art of Mindful Living

Vladimir Nabokov photo
Eckhart Tolle photo

“The brain does not create consciousness, but conciousness created the brain, the most complex physical form on earth, for its expression.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Source: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

Rabindranath Tagore photo
Robert Browning photo
Maurice Maeterlinck photo
Mark Twain photo

“Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”

Vol. II, Conclusion http://books.google.com/books?id=f4EwNleAjJAC&q=%22Travel+is+fatal+to+prejudice+bigotry+and+narrow-mindedness+and+many+of+our+people+need+it+sorely+on+these+accounts+Broad+wholesome+charitable+views+of+men+and+things+cannot+be+acquired+by+vegetating+in+one+little+corner+of+the+earth+all+one's+lifetime%22&pg=PA333#v=onepage
Source: The Innocents Abroad (1869)
Context: Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

John Lennon photo
Juliet Marillier photo
William Shakespeare photo
Douglas Adams photo

“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport."”

Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 1
Context: It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport." Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only exception of this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.

Michael Crichton photo
Antonin Artaud photo
Paramahansa Yogananda photo

“You have come to earth to entertain and to be entertained.”

Source: Autobiography of a Yogi

Christopher Morley photo

“When you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.”

Variant: When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean.
Source: Parnassus on Wheels

Paul Beatty photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo
Friedrich Hölderlin photo

“What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it heaven.

As translated by Michael Hamburger”

Hyperion
Original: (de) Immerhin hat das den Staat zur Hölle gemacht, daß ihn der Mensch zu seinem Himmel machen wollte.

Ronald Reagan photo
Madeline Miller photo
Rainer Maria Rilke photo
Susan B. Anthony photo

“There's not a drug on earth can make life meaningful”

Source: 4.48 Psychosis

Andre Agassi photo
Allen Ginsberg photo
Jeanette Winterson photo
Abraham Lincoln photo

“I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how he could look up into the heavens and say there is no God.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Recollection by Gilbert J. Greene, quoted in The Speaking Oak (1902) by Ferdinand C. Iglehart and Latest Light on Abraham Lincoln (1917) by Ervin S. Chapman
Posthumous attributions

William Shakespeare photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.”

“Schopenhauer as educator” ("Schopenhauer als Erzieher"), § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 127
Untimely Meditations (1876)
Context: In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but he hides it like a bad conscience—why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conventionality and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that constrains the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. With the great majority it is indolence, inertia. … Men are even lazier than they are timid, and fear most of all the inconveniences with which unconditional honesty and nakedness would burden them. Artists alone hate this sluggish promenading in borrowed fashions and appropriated opinions and they reveal everyone’s secret bad conscience, the law that every man is a unique miracle.

Emil M. Cioran photo
Christopher Morley photo
John Lennon photo

“Why in the world are we here? Surely not to live in pain and fear. Why on earth are you there, when you're everywhere-come and get your share.”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

John Lennon, in "Instant Karma!" (written 27 January 1970)
Lyrics
Context: Instant Karma's gonna get you
Gonna knock you off your feet
Better recognize your brothers
Everyone you meet Why in the world are we here?
Surely not to live in pain and fear
Why on Earth are you there
When you're everywhere
Gonna get your share Well, we all shine on
Like the moon and the stars and the sun
Yeah, we all shine on
C'mon and on and on, on, on

Vandana Shiva photo

“We are either going to have a future where women lead the way to make peace with the Earth or we are not going to have a human future at all.”

Vandana Shiva (1952) Indian philosopher

Source: Quoted in Woman power to the fore, by R.S. Binuraj, The Hindu (1 July 2017)

Borís Pasternak photo
Henry David Thoreau photo
Eckhart Tolle photo
Dylan Thomas photo
Federico García Lorca photo

“To see you naked is to recall the Earth.”

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director

" Casidas http://www.poesia-inter.net/fgldt204.htm," IV: Casida de la Mujer Tendida from Primeras Canciones (1936)

André Malraux photo

“On this earth of ours where everything is subject to the passing of time, one thing only is both subject to time and yet victorious over it: the work of art.”

André Malraux (1901–1976) French novelist, art theorist and politician

André Malraux, TV program: Promenades imaginaires dans Florence, 1975.

Pablo Neruda photo
Robinson Jeffers photo
Mitch Albom photo

“Knowing heaven is what heals us on earth.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Source: The First Phone Call from Heaven

Francesca Lia Block photo
Borís Pasternak photo
Anthony Trollope photo
Gabrielle Zevin photo
William Faulkner photo
Willard van Orman Quine photo

“Possibly, but my concern is that there not be more things in my philosophy than are in heaven and earth.”

Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) American philosopher and logician

Response to being quoted William Shakespeare's statement from Hamlet: "There are more things in heaven and earth… than are dreamt of in your philosophy." As quoted in ‪When God is Gone Everything Is Holy: The Making Of A Religious Naturalist‬ (2008) by ‪Chet Raymo‬
1980s and later

Plato photo
Leonardo DiCaprio photo

“Possibly there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your psychiatry, Mr. Garth.”

Garrett Fort (1900–1945) screenwriter

Dracula's Daughter, telling Garth that she believes Von Helsing's story of vampires Unbeknownst to Garth, the Countess is a vampire.
Dracula's Daughter (1936)

Marquis de Sade photo
William Gilbert (astronomer) photo
H.P. Lovecraft photo
Theodore Roosevelt photo
Lewis Carroll photo