Landmass Quotes & Sayings

He loved his family and fellow man, never raised his voice or fists, and was rewarded with a lifelong, routine digestion of small doses of humiliation. — Tim Dorsey

When you look at the planet from low orbit, the impact of the Himalayas on Earth's climate seems obvious. It creates the rain shadow to beat all rain shadows, standing athwart the latitude of the trade winds and squeezing all the rain out of them before they head southwest, thus supplying eight of the Earth's mightiest rivers, but also parching not only the Gobi to the immediate north, but also everything to the southwest, including Pakistan and Iran, Mesopotamia, Saudi Arabia, even North Africa and southern Europe. The dry belt runs more than halfway across the Eurasia-African landmass - a burnt rock landscape, home to the fiery religions that then spread out and torched the rest of the world. Coincidence? — Kim Stanley Robinson

The Pacific, greatest of oceans, has an area exceeding that of all dry land on the planet. Herman Melville called it "the tide-beating heart of earth." Covering more than a third of the planet's surface
as much as the Atlantic, Indian, and Arctic oceans combined
it's the largest geographical feature in the world. Its awesome 165,384,000 square km (up to 16,000 km wide and 11,000 km long) have an average depth of around 4,000 meters. Half the world's liquid water is stored here. You could drop the entire dry landmass of our planet into the Pacific and still have room for another continent the size of Asia. One theory claims the moon may have been flung from the Pacific while the world was still young. — David Stanley

God is the mysterious veil under which we hide our ignorance of the cause. — Leo Errera

Do good and throw it in the sea; if God doesn't see it, the fishes will. — Helen Kieran Reilly

Africa is the second-largest continent, a landmass second from Asia. It also is the second most populated continent, with 900 million people. In fact - coming back to the land mass - Africa is so big that you could fit in the continental United States, China, and the entire Europe into Africa and still have space. — Euvin Naidoo

Arc, amplitude, and curvature sustain a similar relation to each other as time, motion, and velocity, or as volume, mass, and density. — Carl Friedrich Gauss

Here the contention is not just that the new Darwinian paradigm can help us realize whichever moral values we happen to choose. The claim is that the new paradigm can actually influence - legitimately - our choice of basic values in the first place. Some Darwinians insist that such influence can never be legitimate. What they have in mind is the naturalistic fallacy, whose past violation has so tainted their line of work. But what we're doing here doesn't violate the naturalistic fallacy. Quite the opposite. By studying nature - by seeing the origins of the retributive impulse - we see how we have been conned into committing the naturalistic fallacy without knowing it; we discover that the aura of divine truth surrounding retribution is nothing more than a tool with which nature - natural selection - gets us to uncritically accept its "values." Once this revelation hits norm, we are less likely to obey this aura, and thus less likely to commit the fallacy. — Robert Wright

In the child, consciousness rises out of the depths of unconscious psychic life, at first like separate islands, which gradually unite to form a 'continent,' a continuous landmass of consciousness. Progressive mental development means, in effect, extension of consciousness. — Carl Jung

Now, they say that New Zealand is beautiful and I do not know
because after 22 hours on a plane any landmass would be beautiful. — Lewis Black

Son of a mother! Hazel reached the stern and couldn't believe what she saw. When she heard the word turtle, she thought of a cute little thing the size of a jewelry box, sitting on a rock in the middle of a fishpond. When she heard huge, her mind tried to adjust - okay, perhaps it was like the Galapagos tortoise she'd seen in the zoo once, with a shell big enough to ride on. She did not envision a creature the size of an island. When she saw the massive dome of craggy black and brown squares, the word turtle simply did not compute. Its shell was more like a landmass - hills of bone, shiny pearl valleys, kelp and moss forests, rivers of seawater trickling down the grooves of its carapace. — Rick Riordan

True she was old, true she was unbeautiful, true she therefore had no reason to smile, but kind ladies smiled, reason or no. They smiled not because they were happy but because they wished to make happy. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

A far cicada rings high and clear over the river's heavy wash. Morning glory, a lone dandelion, cassia, orchids. So far from the nearest sea, I am taken aback by the sight of a purple land crab, like a relict of the ancient days when the Indian subcontinent, adrift on the earth's mantle, moved northward to collide with the Asian landmass, driving these marine rocks, inch by inch, five miles into the skies. The rise of the Himalaya, begun in the Eocene, some fifty million years ago, is still continuing: an earthquake in 1959 caused mountains to fall into the rivers and changed the course of the great Brahmaputra, which comes down out of Tibet through northeastern India to join the Ganges near its delta at the Bay of Bengal. — Peter Matthiessen

Columbus's real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions. Though an accomplished enough mariner, he was not terribly good at a great deal else, especially geography, the skill that would seem most vital in an explorer. It would be hard to name any figure in history who has achieved more lasting fame with less competence. He spent large parts of eight years bouncing around Caribbean islands and coastal South America convinced that he was in the heart of the Orient and that Japan and China were at the edge of every sunset. He never worked out that Cuba is an island and never once set foot on, or even suspected the existence of, the landmass to the north that everyone thinks he discovered: the United States. — Bill Bryson

The idea that the universe is running down comes from a simple observation about machines. Every machine consumes more energy than it renders. — Jacob Bronowski

As to the fable that there are Antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours, that is on no ground credible. Even if some unknown landmass is there, and not just ocean, there was only one pair of original ancestors, and it is inconceivable that such distant regions should have been peopled by Adam's descendants. — Saint Augustine

At such times the universe gets a little closer to us. They are strange times, times of beginnings and endings. Dangerous and powerful. And we feel it even if we don't know what it is. These times are not necessarily good, and not necessarily bad. In fact, what they are depends on what *we* are. — Terry Pratchett

The pretense that the workings of the mind, like the actions of the body, are subject to the control of laws, does not seem sufficiently demolished ... The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. — Thomas Jefferson

Do not the spirits who dwell in the ether envy man his pain? — Kahlil Gibran

Most people hugely underestimate the amount of 'empty space' we have in our country. Fly over the U.K., and you see that human settlement does not fill up the U.K. at all. It accounts for something of the order of 15 per cent of the landmass. — Evan Davis

There are many pleasant fictions of the law in constant operation, but there is not one so pleasant or practically humorous as that which supposes every man to be of equal value in its impartial eye, and the benefits of all laws to be equally attainable by all men, without the smallest reference to the furniture of their pockets. — Charles Dickens

In the small glass box the auctioneer held high lay waiting for me the sacred teeth of none other than Marilyn Monroe. — Valeria Luiselli

Africa is underpopulated. We have 20% of the world's landmass and 13% of its population. — Mo Ibrahim

Faith-is the pierless bridge supporting what We see unto the scene that we do not. — Emily Dickinson

Do not fear lack of knowledge, talent or skill. Seek motivation and the others will come. — Randall Dale Adams

You know you're in a college town when there's a restaurant called "Pancakea." The establishment was a pancake/coffee house, and Choo, Molly, Sig, and I were sitting in a booth arguing about the place and its name and their relative merits. I thought the name was a take on panacea, implying that pancakes are a cure for everything. Sig thought the owner wanted the place to become the IKEA of pancakes. Molly thought that given how large the pancakes were, the title might be a riff on Pangea, the first continental landmass. We all agreed that the owner was probably an ex-college student who couldn't get a job with his or her major, but we couldn't agree on whether that major was philosophy, marketing, anthropology, or just heavy drinking. — Elliott James