Cambrian Quotes & Sayings

We live in our tales of ourselves ... and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls ... — Gregory Maguire

600 million years ago, the monopolizing grip of the algae was broken and an enormous proliferation of new lifeforms emerged, an event called the Cambrian explosion. Life had arisen almost immediately after the origin of the Earth, which suggests that life may be an inevitable chemical process on an Earth-like planet. — Carl Sagan

The English team's revisions showed that the Cambrian had been a time of unparalleled innovation and experimentation in body designs. For almost four billion years life had dawdled along without any detectable ambitions in the direction of complexity, and then suddenly, in the space of just five or ten million years, it had created all the basic body designs still in use today. Name a creature, from a nematode worm to Cameron Diaz, and they all use architecture first created in the Cambrian party. — Bill Bryson

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace. They swore, if we gave Them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease. But when we disarmed They sold us, and delivered us, bound, to our foe, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know." — Rudyard Kipling

It is hard to imagine Andre Le Notre laying out the exquisite landscape designs for Vaux-le-Vicomte, and later the magnificent Chateau de Versailles, with no high hill to stand on, no helicopter to fly in, and no drone to show him the complexities of the terrain. Yet he did, and with extreme precision, accuracy, and high style. — Martha Stewart

There are good photographers who might elevate themselves to the ranks of the great simply by burning most of their work. — Janet Malcolm

Cambrian animals were not particularly large at first, but they were plentiful and innovative. Jaws appeared. Eyes appeared. Nature began experimenting with weaponry. — Wendy Williams

Today biologists believe that during the "Cambrian explosion," about half a billion years ago, nature experimented with a vast array of shapes and forms for tiny, emerging multicellular creatures. Some had spinal cords shaped like an X, Y, or Z. Some had radial symmetry like a starfish. By accident one had a spinal cord shaped like an I, with bilateral symmetry, and it was the ancestor of most mammals on Earth. So in principle the humanoid shape with bilateral symmetry, the same shape that Hollywood uses to depict aliens in space, does not necessarily have to apply to all intelligent life. — Michio Kaku

I'm not sure anyone know that they're looking for until they find it" -Eadlyn — Kiera Cass

Physically, mentally, emotionally
it seems like every part of me is broken in one way or another. — Patrick Carman

Perception always makes precedence over reality
.
Time explodes everything.

They will seek, we will create, they will find. — Fraser Beath McEwing

As Moses would learn during the Exodus, who he was bore no impact on the outcome of his situation. — Jen Wilkin

Really, I protest
what is left for the satirical mind to invent when reality so surpasses it? — Jude Morgan

Christ can forgive you," he whispered, though he didn't believe it. There wasn't a hint of compassion in those ice-blue eyes.
"That's grand," she said.
Her features became again those of the pleasant brown-haired nurse. She smiled, pulled the pillow from under his head, and covered his face. — Stephen M. Irwin

If all these considerations are correct, then the appearance of eyes really could have ignited the Cambrian explosion. And if that's the case, then the evolution of the eye must certainly number among the most dramatic and important events in the whole history of life on earth. — Nick Lane

I fell into a hornets' nest of revolutionary feminism. — Julian Assange

There is a certain irony in the fact that Britain gave the world nearly all its most important geological names - Devonian, Cambrian, Silurian, Ordovician - but that the one epoch that everybody knows about is named for the Jura Mountains in France, even though the Dorset coast is actually the best place in the world to see Jurassic outcrops. — Bill Bryson

Don't live in the past, and don't carry the past around like a burden. But simply use your past as one of your mentors to help refine mistakes and make changes you can invest now and the future. — Jim Rohn

Perhaps I shall not write my account of the Paleolithic at all, but make a film of it. A silent film at that, in which I shall show you first the great slumbering rocks of the Cambrian period, and move from those to the mountains of Wales ... from Ordovician to Devonian, on the lush glowing Cotswolds, on to the white cliffs of Dover ... An impressionistic, dreaming film, in which the folded rocks arise and flower and grow and become Salisbury Cathedral and York Minster ... — Penelope Lively

Pre-Cambrian Memory. — John Steinbeck

When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled. — Charles Darwin

The facts of paleontology seem to support creation and the flood rather than evolution. For instance, all the major groups of invertebrates appear "suddenly" in the first fossil ferrous strata (Cambrian) of the earth with their distinct specializations indicating that they were all created almost at the same time. — Enoch

Useful mnemonic for remembering the geologic periods of the last half-billion years is: Camels Often Sit Down Carefully, Perhaps Their Joints Creak (Cambrian-Ordovician-Silurian-Devonian-Carboniferous-Permian-Triassic-Jurassic-Cretaceous). The mnemonic unfortunately runs out before the most recent periods: the Paleogene, the Neogene, and the current Quaternary. — Elizabeth Kolbert

Extraordinary; I could almost see the Cambrian Mountains — Jasper Fforde

Music is a language by whose means messages are elaborated, that such messages can be understood by the many but sent out only by few, and that it alone among all the languages unites the contradictory character of being at once intelligible and untranslatable - these facts make the creator of music a being like the gods. — Claude Levi-Strauss

When I was a tadpole and you were a fish
In the Paleozoic time,
And side by side on the ebbing tide,
We sprawled through the ooze and slime,
Or skittered with many a caudal flip,
Through the depths of the Cambrian fen,
My heart was rife with the joy of life,
For I loved you even then.

Mindless we lived and mindless we loved,
And mindless at last we died,
And deep in a rift of the caradoc drift,
We slumbered side by side,
The world turned on in the lathe of time,
The hot lands heaved amain,
Till we caught our breath from the womb of death,
And crept into light again. — Langdon Smith

It has been my fate in a long life of production to be credited chiefly with the equivocal virtue of industry, a quality so excellent in morals, so little satisfactory in art. — Margaret Oliphant

It seems obvious now: the child who spends school days in a fog of semi-comprehension has no way to know her problem is not that she is slow-witted. — Sonia Sotomayor

If you could fly backwards into the past at the rate of one year per second, it would take you about half an hour to reach the time of Christ, and a little over three weeks to get back to the beginnings of human life. But it would take you twenty years to reach the dawn of the Cambrian period. — Bill Bryson