Hugh Miller Quotes

• Problems are only opportunities with thorns on them.

  Hugh Miller

  Encouraging, Broken Heart, Heartbroken

  54 Copy quote

• Life itself is a school, and Nature always a fresh study.

  Hugh Miller

  School, Study, School Life

  Hugh Miller (1858). “My Schools and Schoolmasters: Or, The Story of My Education”, p.562

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• Nature is a vast tablet, inscribed with signs, each of which has its own significancy, and becomes poetry in the mind when read; and geology is simply the key by which myriads of these signs, hitherto indecipherable, can be unlocked and perused, and thus a new province added to the poetical domain.

  Hugh Miller

  Nature, Science, Keys

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• Prayer is so mighty an instrument that no one ever thoroughly mastered all its keys. They sweep along the infinite scale of man's wants and God's goodness.

  Hugh Miller

  Prayer, Men, Keys

  Hugh Miller (1870). “The Headship of Christ: And, The Rights of the Christian People : a Collection of Essays, Historical and Descriptive Sketches, and Personal Portraitures with the Author's Celebrated Letter to Lord Brougham”, p.354

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• It is an excellent circumstance that hospitality grows best where it is most needed. In the thick of men it dwindles and disappears, life fruit in the thick of a wood; but where people are planted sparely it blossoms and matures, like apples on a standard or an espalier. It flourishes where the inn and lodging-house cannot exist.

  Hugh Miller

  Men, Apples, People

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• The sky is full of tokens which speak to the intelligent.

  Hugh Miller

  Intelligent, Sky, Speak

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• Poets need be in no degree jealous of the geologists. The stony science, with buried creations for its domains, and half an eternity charged with its annals, possesses its realms of dim and shadowy fields, in which troops of fancies already walk like disembodied ghosts in the old fields of Elysium, and which bid fair to be quite dark and uncertain enough for all the purposes of poesy for centuries to come.

  Hugh Miller

  Jealous, Dark, Science

  Hugh Miller, Harriet Myrtle (1859). “Popular Geology: A Series of Lectures Read Before the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh, with Descriptive Sketches from a Geologist's Portfolio”, p.127

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• No true geologist holds by the development hypothesis;-it has been resigned to sciolists and smatterers;-and there is but one other alternative. They began to be, through the miracle of creation. From the evidence furnished by these rocks we are shut down either to belief in miracle, or to something else infinitely harder of reception, and as thoroughly unsupported by testimony as it is contrary to experience. Hume is at length answered by the severe truths of the stony science.

  Hugh Miller

  Truth, Science, Rocks

  Hugh Miller, Louis Agassiz (1859). “The Foot-prints of the Creator: Or, The Asterolepis of Stromness”, p.301

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• The footprint of the savage traced in the sand is sufficient to attest the presence of man to the atheist who will not recognize God, whose hand is impressed upon the entire universe.

  Hugh Miller

  Atheist, Men, Hands

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• It is an excellent circumstance that hospitality grows best where it is most needed.

  Hugh Miller

  Thank You, Hospitality, Excellent

  Hugh Miller, William Samuel Symonds (1858). “The Cruise of the Betsy; Or, a Summer Ramble Among the Fossilferous Deposits of the Hebrides. With Rambles of a Geologist; Or, Ten Thousand Miles Over the Fossilferous Deposits of Scotland. [Edited by W. S. Symonds.]”, p.133

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• Because science flourishes, must poesy decline? The complaint serves but to betray the weakness of the class who urge it. True, in an age like the present,-considerably more scientific than poetical,-science substitutes for the smaller poetry of fiction, the great poetry of truth.

  Hugh Miller

  Science, Class, Age

  Hugh Miller, Harriet Myrtle (1859). “Sketch book of popular geology: Popular geology: A series of lectures read before the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh”, p.123

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• All geologic history is full of the beginning and the ends of species-of their first and last days; but it exhibits no genealogies of development.

  Hugh Miller

  Science, History, Development

  Hugh Miller (1857). “The Testimony of the Rocks”, p.220

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• The development doctrines are doing much harm on both sides of the Atlantic, especially among intelligent mechanics, and a class of young men engaged in the subordinate departments of trade and the law. And the harm, thus considerable in amount, must be necessarily more than merely considerable in degree. For it invariably happens, that when persons in these walks become materialists, they become turbulent subjects and bad men.

  Hugh Miller

  Science, Men, Intelligent

  "The Foot-prints of the Creator: Or, The Asterolepis of Stromness".

  8 Copy quote

• The geologist, in those tables of stone which form his records, finds no examples of dynasties once passed away again returning. There has no repetition of the dynasty of the fish, of the reptile, of the mammal. The dynasty of the future is to have glorified man for its inhabitant; but it is to be the dynasty-"the kingdom"-not of glorified man made in the image of God, but of God himself in the form man.

  Hugh Miller

  Future, Science, Men

  Hugh Miller (1857). “The Testimony of the Rocks: Or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed”, p.178

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• The primary rocks, ... I regard as the deposits of a period in which the earth's crust had sufficiently cooled down to permit the existence of a sea, with the necessary denuding agencies,-waves and currents,-and, in consequence, of deposition also; but in which the internal heat acted so near the surface, that whatever was deposited came, matter of course, to be metamorphosed into semi-plutonic forms, that retained only the stratification.

  Hugh Miller

  Agency, Rocks, Sea

  Hugh Miller, Harriet Myrtle (1859). “Sketch book of popular geology: Popular geology: A series of lectures read before the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh”, p.297

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• The six thousand years of human history form but a portion of the geologic day that is passing over us: they do not extend into the yesterday of the globe, far less touch the myriads of ages spread out beyond.

  Hugh Miller

  Science, Years, Yesterday

  Hugh Miller (1857). “An Autobiography: My Schools and Schoolmasters; Or, The Story of My Education”, p.441

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• That special substance according to whose mass and degree of development all the creatures of this world take rank in the scale of creation, is not bone, but brain.

  Hugh Miller

  Science, Brain, Special

  Hugh Miller, Louis Agassiz (1859). “The Foot-prints of the Creator: Or, The Asterolepis of Stromness”, p.160

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• But should we continue to linger amid a scene so featureless and wild, or venture adown some yawning opening into the abyss beneath, where all is fiery and yet dark,-a solitary hell, without suffering or sin,-we would do well to commit ourselves to the guidance of a living poet of the true faculty,-Thomas Aird and see with his eyes.

  Hugh Miller

  Eye, Dark, Yawning

  Hugh Miller, Harriet Myrtle (1859). “Popular Geology: A Series of Lectures Read Before the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh, with Descriptive Sketches from a Geologist's Portfolio”, p.298

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• But, in truth, the existing premises, wholly altered by geologic science, are no longer those of Hume. The footprint on the sand — to refer to his happy illustration — does not now stand alone. Instead of one, we see many footprints, each in turn in advance of the print behind it, and on a higher level.

  Hugh Miller

  Science, Illustration, Feet

  "The Testimony of the Rocks: Or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed".

  8 Copy quote

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