Geographer Quotes & Sayings

The real cocktail party conversation would probably go something like this:
"Actually, I have a degree in geography."
"Geography? Wow, I'm terrible with maps. I bet YOU know all your state capitals, though!"
(Geographer's smile freezes, left eye starts to twitch uncontrollably.) — Ken Jennings

[T]he radical geographer Iain Boal had prophesied, The longing for a better world will need to arise at the imagined meeting place of many movements of resistance, as many as there are sites of closure and exclusion. The resistance will be as transnational capitalism. — Rebecca Solnit

I AM come of a race noted for vigor of fancy and ardor of passion. Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence
whether much that is glorious
whether all that is profound
does not spring from disease of thought
from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in waking, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret. In snatches, they learn something of the wisdom which is of good, and more of the mere knowledge which is of evil. They penetrate, however, rudderless or compassless into the vast ocean of the "light ineffable", and again, like the adventures of the Nubian geographer, "agressi sunt mare tenebrarum, quid in eo esset exploraturi".
We will say then, that I am mad. — Edgar Allan Poe

HEADMASTER: I was a geographer. I went to Hull.
IRWIN: Oh. Larkin.
HEADMASTER: Everybody says that. 'Hull? Oh, Larkin.' I don't know about the poetry ... as I say, I was a geographer ... but as a librarian he was pitiless. The Himmler of the Accessions Desk. And now, we're told, women in droves.
Art. They get away with murder. — Alan Bennett

Ancient astrology was rather different from the modern
horoscope. Its more learned practitioners enjoyed intellectual respectability, and there was a substantial overlap between astrology and philosophy. People would consult astrologers on anything, from the time and manner in which they were going to die to who was likely to win in the chariot-races that afternoon.
The chronology of the origins and development of astrology are impossible to establish, and were debated even in the ancient world. Suffice it to say here that the Western tradition was one of many traditions: Indian, Chinese, Middle Eastern. It was Ptolemy, the Hellenistic geographer and astrologer, who first laid the technical foundations of Western astrology in his Tetrabiblos
('Four Books'). But the rise in the prominence of astrology was closely tied to the Roman imperial regime. It greatly benefited emperors to have their sovereignty 'written in the stars'. — Helen Morales

GEOGRAPHER, n. A chap who can tell you offhand the difference between the outside of the world and the inside. — Ambrose Bierce

What is that big book?" said the little prince. "What are you doing?"
"I am a geographer," said the old gentleman.
"What is a geographer?" asked the little prince.
"A geographer is a scholar who knows the location of all the seas, rivers, towns, mountains, and deserts."
"That is very interesting," said the little prince. "Here at last is a man who has a real profession! — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

The good life . . . cannot be mere indulgence. It must contain a measure of grit and truth," observed geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. Tuan — Eric Weiner

Here Ibn Hawqal, about 970, found some 300 mosques, and 300 schoolteachers who were highly regarded by the inhabitants "in spite of the fact," says the geographer, "that schoolteachers are notorious for their mental deficiency and light brains. — Will Durant

"Nature" is not to be understood as that which is just present-at-hand, nor as the power of Nature. The wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock; the river is water-power, the wind is wind 'in the sails'. As the 'environment' is discovered, the 'Nature' thus discovered is encountered too. If its kind of Being as ready-to-hand is disregarded, this 'Nature' itself can be discovered and defined simply in its pure presence-at-hand. But when this happens, the Nature which 'stirs and strives', which assails us and enthralls us as landscape, remains hidden. The botanist's plants are not the flowers of the hedgerow; the 'source' which the geographer establishes for a river is not the 'springhead in the dale'. — Martin Heidegger

The geographer and politician Edwin Brooks argued more than 40 years ago that what we had to avoid was a dystopian future of a 'crowded glowering planet of massive inequalities of wealth buttressed by stark force and endlessly threatened by desperate men in the global ghettoes'.2 These — Paul Rogers

However close you can be to a vegan diet and further from the mean American diet, the better you are for the planet." quoted by Gidon Eshel (Bard College geographer) — James McWilliams

"What place would you advise me to visit now?" he asked. "The planet Earth," replied the geographer. "It has a good reputation." — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Do you know what constitutes a great poet? He is a person without shame, incapable of blushing. Ordinary fools have moments when they go off by themselves and blush with shame; not so the great poet ... If you really have to quote someone, quote a geographer; that way you won't give yourself away. (p 44) — Knut Hamsun

Genius is the naturalist or geographer of the supersensible regions, and draws their map; and, by acquainting us with new fields of activity, cools our affection for the old. These are at once accepted as the reality, of which the world we have conversed with is the show. — Ralph Waldo Emerson