Earth Quotes

“There are lands of the imagination that cannot exist, but seem real; and there are lands that once existed that somehow seem remote and hard to credit. Perhaps their comparative solidity depends on the hand of a skilled writer. Who can doubt the reality of the countries beyond the sea that Jonathan Swift peopled so skilfully for his hero Lemuel Gulliver to visit, not merely to stimulate the imagination, but as a ruse to illustrate human frailties: puffed up and monstrous in Brobdignag, or shrunk in Lilliput to petty proportions to match the triviality of their concerns? Yet to travel back in time to the land of the Gonds - Gondwana - or to try to grasp the reality of Pangaea 250 million years ago seems to require a greater leap of imagination. But these places existed, as solid as Africa is today.”
― Richard Fortey, Earth: An Intimate History

“There has been a revolution in our understanding over the last forty years, and the gains in knowledge are permanent. But we will never know everything, and that is as it should be. From the obscuring mist of the past, science has ensured that some of the mountains have emerged into clear view, but as soon as that happens the misty shadows of further peaks are glimpsed in the distance, rank upon rank: so many other heights to climb, so many mysteries to investigate.”
― Richard Fortey, Earth: An Intimate History

“History envelops the past in uncertainty, like the mist obscuring the beech trees in the valley below me. The deeper the history, the more the outlines blur, the more inferences about the past are subject to change.”
― Richard Fortey, Earth: An Intimate History

“German professors of that time were like God, only more frightening.”
― Richard Fortey, Earth: An Intimate History

“In this fashion, knowledge begets questions which beget new technology which provides answers--which in turn beget questions. This is the implacable carousel of research.”
― Richard Fortey, Earth: An Intimate History

“Ralph Waldo Emerson could write (in The Conduct of Life, 1860): ‘The influence of fine scenery, the presence of mountains, appeases our irritations and elevates our friendships.’ Mountains”
― Richard Fortey, The Earth: An Intimate History