Werner Quotes

“It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Warner laces his boots and sings the songs and marches the marches, acting less out of duty than out of a time worn desire to be dutiful.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Frau Elena, does a bee know it's going to die if it stings somebody?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Half a century ago Ostwald (1910) distinguished classicists and romanticists among the scientific investigators: the former being inclined to design schemes and to use consistently the deductions from working hypotheses; the latter being more fit for intuitive discoveries of functional relations between phenomena and therefore more able to open up new fields of study. Examples of both character types are Werner and Hutton. Werner was a real classicist. At the end of the eighteenth century he postulated the theory of “neptunism,” according to which all rocks including granites, were deposited in primeval seas. It was an artificial scheme, but, as a classification system, it worked quite satisfactorily at the time. Hutton, his contemporary and opponent, was more a romanticist. His concept of 'plutonism' supposed continually recurrent circuits of matter, which like gigantic paddle wheels raise material from various depths of the earth and carry it off again. This is a very flexible system which opens the mind to accept the possible occurrence in the course of time of a great variety of interrelated plutonic and tectonic processes.”
― R.W. van Bemmelen

“The frontispiece of Mr. Lyell's book is enough to throw a Wernerian into fits.”
― George Poulett Scrope