Quotes & Sayings About The Age Of The Earth

The great age of the earth will appear greater to man when he understands the origin of living organisms and the reasons for the gradual development and improvement of their organization. This antiquity will appear even greater when he realizes the length of time and the particular conditions which were necessary to bring all the living species into existence. This is particularly true since man is the latest result and present climax of this development, the ultimate limit of which, if it is ever reached, cannot be known. — Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

Young earth creationists try to force modern science into a literal reading of Genesis 1. Day-age theorists try to fit Genesis 1 into modern science. Proponents of the restoration view try to have their cake and eat it too by inserting a speculative gap between verses 1 and 2 of this chapter. All three views are fundamentally misguided and are rooted in contradictory opinions about the meaning and significance of various words and phrases in Genesis 1 (e.g., "day," "formless void"). None of them have seriously considered the more fundamental question concerning the kind of literature we are dealing with in Genesis 1. More — Gregory A. Boyd

This night shalt thou know the favour of the Gods, and behold on Parnassus those dreams which the Gods have through ages sent to earth to show that they are not dead. For poets are the dreams of Gods, and in each and every age someone hath sung unknowingly the message and the promise from the lotosgardens beyond the sunset. — H.P. Lovecraft

More and more the world resembles an entomologist's dream. The earth is moving out of its orbit, the axis has shifted; from the north the snow blows down in huge knife-blue drifts. A new ice age is setting in, the transverse sutures are closing up and everywhere throughout the corn belt the fetal world is dying, turning to dead mastoid. Inch by inch the deltas are drying out and the river beds are smooth as glass. A new day is dawning, a metallurgical day, when the earth shall clink with showers of bright yellow ore. As the thermometer drops, the form of the world grows blurred; osmosis there still is, and here and there articulation, but at the periphery the veins are all varicose, at the periphery the light waves bend and the sun bleeds like a broken rectum. — Henry Miller

I developed an interest in major league baseball and the 1960s were, as far as I'm concerned (with a nod to the Babe Ruth era of the 1920s), the Golden Age of Baseball. Like most people in the valley, I was a diehard Yankees fan and, in a pinch, a Mets fan. They were New York teams, and most New Englanders rooted for the Boston Red Sox, but our end of Connecticut was geographically and culturally closer to New York than Boston, and that's where our loyalties went.
And what was not to love? The Yankees ruled the earth in those days. The great Roger Maris set one Major League record after another and even he was almost always one hit shy of Mickey Mantle, God on High of the Green Diamond. — John William Tuohy

That night I dreamed about flying turtles and forest fires and fucking the earth ... The next morning I awoke and I listened to the tree company tearing away the woods and the timber. I heard the chainsaws ripping outside my open window and I heard the dynamite exploding all the mountain tops away for the black rock below. And instead of feeling sad like I did most mornings, I felt something else now. I found myself saying, 'Explode. Explode you mountains. Rip them down you fuckers. Take this stinking dirt and leave this land with hatred and death. — Scott McClanahan

It's the old who need work. They've lost their spring and their zest for life, and need something to hold on to. It's all wrong, the way we arrange it - making the young work and the old sit idle. It should be the other way about. Girls and boys don't get bored with perpetual holidays; they live each moment of them hard; they would welcome the eternal Sabbath; and indeed I trust we shall all do that, as our youth is to be renewed like eagles. But old age on this earth is far too sad to do nothing in. — Rose Macaulay

Earth? Golden Age? Stilgar was irritated and puzzled. Why would Paul wish to discuss myths from the dawn of time? — Frank Herbert

It happened a long time ago," she said quietly. Wells nodded. The words I know formed in his brain but got lost somewhere on the way to his mouth. His eyes began to prickle and he turned away quickly. Eight billion. That's how many people had died during the Cataclysm. It'd always seemed as abstract as any huge figure, like the age of Earth, or the number of stars in the galaxy. Yet now, he'd give anything to know that the people who'd eaten dinner together in this kitchen, with those plates, had somehow made it off the burning planet. "Wells, — Kass Morgan

I stopped short in the path today to admire how the trees grow up without forethought regardless of the time and circumstances. They do not wait as men do - now is the golden age of the sapling - Earth, air, sun, and rain, are occasion enough - . — Henry David Thoreau

In an age of rampant chronic disease, reconnecting with the Earth's energy beneath our very feet may provide a way back to better health and keeping our bodies in top condition throughout our lives. — Jed Diamond

Verily, too early died that Hebrew whom the preachers of slow death honour: and to many hath it proved a calamity that he died too early. As yet had he known only tears, and the melancholy of the Hebrews, together with the hatred of the good and just - the Hebrew Jesus: then was he seized with the longing for death. Had he but remained in the wilderness, and far from the good and just! Then, perhaps, would he have learned to live, and love the earth - and laughter also! Believe it, my brethren! He died too early; he himself would have disavowed his doctrine had he attained to my age! Noble enough was he to disavow! — Friedrich Nietzsche

I had this desire to see the world. I couldn't see any of it, but I saw it in my imagination, and that's why I always read books, and I could go to Mars or Middle Earth or the Hyborian age. — George R R Martin

Bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. Take what I cannot give - my heart, body, thoughts, time, abilities, money, health, strength, nights, days, youth, age - and spend them in Thy service, O my crucified Master, Redeemer, God. Oh, let not these be mere words! Whom have I in the heaven but Thee? And there is no one upon earth that I desire in comparison to Thee. My heart is athirst for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God? — Elizabeth Prentiss

Barry had done it with her, the girl I loved, and it had meant nothing to him; Tanya would die and no one would care; and there were billions of bodies alive on earth and they would all be buried and ground into dirt; and Picasso was a master at age sixteen and I was a perfect shit. — James Franco

The cultural forces that help politically sustain both the militaristic and the corporate function of the Deep State, however, are growing more irrational and antiscience. A military tradition that glories in force and appeals to self-sacrifice is the polar opposite of the Enlightenment heritate of rationality, the search for peace, and a belief in the common destiny of mankind. The warrior-leader, like the witch doctor, ultimately appeals to irrational emotionalism; and the cultural psychology that produces the bravest and most loyal warriors is a mind-set that is usually hostile to the sort of free inquiry of which scientific progress depends. This dynamic is observable in Afghanistan: no outside power has been able to conquer and pacify that society for millennia because of the tenacity of its warrior spirit; yet the country has one of the highest illiteracy rates on earth and is barely out of the Bronze Age in social development. p 260 — Mike Lofgren

The Age of Intellect is accompanied by surprising advances in natural science. In the ninth century, for example, in the age of Mamun, the Arabs measured the circumference of the earth with remarkable accuracy. Seven centuries were to pass before Western Europe discovered that the world was not flat. Less than fifty years after the amazing scientific discoveries under Mamun, the Arab Empire collapsed. Wonderful and beneficent as was the progress of science, it did not save the empire from chaos. — John Bagot Glubb

I'm reminded of how passionate Kuan Yin is about the importance of being human on this earth," continues Lena.

"It's the most important thing in your existence," states Kuan Yin. "Your existence is eternal. This phase (of your soul) is so important because you learn so much in human form. This is where the individual's 'spark' of existence can expand into bigger, more powerful energies. — Hope Bradford

If Satan really wanted to face Jesus Christ in a battle, he will be facilitating the End of the Age by helping to spread the gospel to the whole world. This must be fulfilled for the End to come. Matthew 24:14 — Felix Wantang

If you want to know the age of the Earth - look upon the sea in a storm. But what storm can fully reveal the heart of a man? Between Suez and the China Sea are many nameless men who prefer to live and die unknown. This is the story of one such man. Among the great gallery of rogues and heroes thrown up on the beaches and ports - no man was more respected or more damned than - Lord Jim. — Joseph Conrad

A knowledge of the true age of the Earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do. — Francis Crick

It's a pity we're still officially living in an age called the Holocene. The Anthropocene - human dominance of biological, chemical and geological processes on Earth - is already an undeniable reality. — Paul J. Crutzen

If the age of the Earth were a calendar year and today were a breath before midnight on New Year's Eve, we showed up a scant fifteen minutes ago, and all of recorded history has blinked by in the last sixty seconds. Luckily for us, our planet-mates
the fantastic meshwork of plants, animals, and microbes
have been patiently perfecting their wares since March, an incredible 3.8 billion years since the first bacteria ... After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival. — Janine Benyus

Remember your contemporaries who have passed away and were your age. Remember the honors and fame they earned, the high posts they held, and the beautiful bodies they possessed. Today all of them are turned to dust. They have left orphans and widows behind them, their wealth is being wasted, and their houses turned into ruins.
No sign of them is left today, and they lie in dark holes underneath the earth.
Picture their faces before your mind's eye and ponder. — Al-Ghazali

One of the most distinguished psychiatrists living, Dr. Carl Jung, says in his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul (*):
During the past thirty years, people from all the civilised countries of the earth have consulted me. I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among all my patients in the second half of life-that is to say, over thirty-five-there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook. — Dale Carnegie

When we approach theology as facts to look at, it is easy to allow certain theological debates to replace Scripture as our primary theological subject matter. These debates - such as the categorization of God's attributes, the nature of predestination, the age of the earth, and the continuation of certain spiritual gifts - are not unimportant issues, and sometimes the church must return to them for extended theological reflection. However, the church's mission is derailed when theology becomes little more than a discipline helping people know what to believe about these particular issues. These debates are necessary to the task of theology, but they are not primary. The primary role of theology is to cultivate in us a love for and knowledge of — Daniel L. Akin

I believe in rendering to science the things that belong to science. I have no problem with evolution or discussions of the age of the Earth, for I don't believe that we come anywhere near comprehending the mind of God or the workings of the universe. Science can explain a lot, but it cannot give us faith, and I think we need both. — Brandon Sanderson

Every age has its dreams, its symbols of romance. Past generations were moved by the graceful power of the great windjammers, by the distant whistle of locomotives pounding through the night, by the caravans leaving on the Golden Road to Samarkand, by quinqueremes of Nineveh from distant Ophir ... Our grandchildren will likewise have their inspiration-among the equatorial stars. They will be able to look up at the night sky and watch the stately procession of the Ports of Earth-the strange new harbors where the ships of space make their planetfalls and their departures. — Arthur C. Clarke

If I could do anything, I would go to the middle of our planet Earth and seek uranium, rubies and gold. I'd look for unspoiled monsters. Then I'd move to the country.
Florie Rotondo, age 8 — Truman Capote

We are told of the time when, with the same beliefs, with the same institutions, all the world seemed happy: why complain of these beliefs; why banish these institutions? We are slow to admit that that happy age served the precise purpose of developing the principle of evil which lay dormant in society; we accuse men and gods, the powers of earth and the forces of Nature. Instead of seeking the cause of the evil in his mind and heart, man blames his masters, his rivals, his neighbors, and himself; nations arm themselves, and slay and exterminate each other, until equilibrium is restored by the vast depopulation, and peace again arises from the ashes of the combatants. So loath is humanity to touch the customs of its ancestors, and to change the laws framed by the founders of communities, and confirmed by the faithful observance of the ages. — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child's need for exactly that sanctuary. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia.
Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites. — Katherine Dunn

Belief that the Earth is only several thousands years old carries a curious implication. The physical evidence for the Earth's age emerged from the same atomic discoveries that later gave the world nuclear weaponry and power plants. The scientific understanding of uranium isotopes that produce the date 4.5 billion years ago is the same understanding of uranium isotopes that led to the production and detonation of nuclear bombs. If scientists do not understand uranium decay well enough to date the Earth, there also cannot be, and can never have been, nuclear weaponry. Certainly a world and a history absent these weapons are desirable, but they are counter-factual. — Eric Roston

Garden books are quite unconscious that besides telling us how to turn our patch of earth into a garden, they are also expressing the way their age looks at the world, the state of their society. — Nan Fairbrother

Although the patriarchal ego prides itself on being reasonable, the twentieth century has been anything but the Age of Reason. In our collective neurosis, we have raped the earth, disrupted the delicate balance of nature, and created phallic missiles of mass destruction. — Marion Woodman

Among us, I am happy to say, old age is honorable, and regarded as a blessing from the Lord. It is our duty to desire to live long upon the earth, that we may do as much good as we possibly can. I esteem it a great privilege to have the opportunity of living in mortality. The Lord has sent us here "for a wise and glorious purpose," and it should be our business to find out what that purpose is and then to order our lives accordingly. — Lorenzo Snow

M. At this moment, when each of us must fit an arrow to his bow and enter the lists anew, to
reconquer, within history and in spite of it, that which he owns already, the thin yield of his fields, the
brief love of this earth, at this moment when at last a man is born, it is time to forsake our age and its
adolescent furies. The bow bends; the wood complains. At the moment of supreme tension, there will leap
into flight an unswerving arrow, a shaft that is inflexible and free. — Albert Camus

The seeds of the Little War were planted in a restless summer during the mid-1960s, with sit-ins and student demonstrations as youth tested its strength. By the early 1970s over 75 percent of the people living on Earth were under 21 years of age. The population continued to climb - and with it the youth percentage.
In the 1980s the figure was 79.7 percent.
In the 1990s, 82.4 percent.
In the year 2000 - critical mass. — William F. Nolan

There has always been the wind.
Since our planet began to turn, there has been the wind. This ball of dirt and fire and water started to spin. The air stirred. And Earth's time began.
But the beginnings of the wind are lost in the mists of time. The wind blew before the Appian Way wended through Rome. It blew before the Parthenon crowned Athens. Before pyramids sprang up in Egypt.
Before the Mayans. Before the Incas.
Before Man. — Kaye George

When Earth's last picture is painted And the tubes are twisted and dried When the oldest colors have faded
And the youngest critic has died
We shall rest, and faith, we shall need it
Lie down for an aeon or two
'Till the Master of all good workmen Shall put us to work anew
And those that were good shall be happy They'll sit in a golden chair
They'll splash at a ten league canvas With brushes of comet's hair
They'll find real saints to draw from Magdalene, Peter, and Paul
They'll work for an age at a sitting And never be tired at all.
And only the Master shall praise us. And only the Master shall blame.
And no one will work for the money.
No one will work for the fame.
But each for the joy of the working, And each, in his separate star,
Will draw the thing as he sees it.
For the God of things as they are! — Rudyard Kipling

Kshatriya, or the man who is qualified to protect the sufferers, is meant to rule the state. Untrained, lower class men or men without ambition to protect the sufferers cannot be placed on the seat as an administrator. Unfortunately in the age of Kali the lower class men without training occupy the post of a ruler by strength of popular votes and instead of protecting the sufferers, such men create a situation quite intolerable for everyone. Such rulers illegally gratify themselves at the cost of all comforts of the citizens, and thus the chaste mother earth cries to see the pitiable condition of her sons, both men and animals. — A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

If we do not respect our Earth, the World of Emotions & Mental development will suffer. We all need Rhythm in our food consumption, sleep patterns, cleanliness & exercise regime. This Routine does not come naturally and it is learned and exercised from very young age.'
Conscious Parenting by Natasa Pantovic Nuit Quotes about kids development Routine — Natasa Nuit Pantovic

He finally understood ... the thing that the people during the Paleolitic Age, freaking 20,000 to 8,000 B.C., were after when they came up with mythologies to do with flight - a desire for the magic of the sky, for something bigger than their feet treading the earth. — Maud Casey

The universe had once been bright, too. For a short time after the big bang, all matter existed in the form of light, and only after the universe turned to burnt ash did heavier elements precipitate out of the darkness and form planets and life. Darkness was the mother of life and of civilization. On Earth, an avalanche of curses and abuse rolled out into space toward Blue Space and Bronze Age, but the two ships made no reply. They cut off all contact with the Solar System, for to those two worlds, the Earth was already dead. The two dark ships became one with the darkness, separated by the Solar System and drifting further apart. Carrying with them the entirety of human thoughts and memories, and embracing all of the Earth's glory and dreams, they quietly disappeared into the eternal night. — Liu Cixin

For Russian Jews, Zionism was an immediate solution to age-old problems.
"Anywhere is better than Russia," Karl agreed, "but for Western Jews, Zionism is a trap, I think. Once Jews are permitted a territorial center, it will be too easy to drive the rest of us from every other nation on Earth. 'Go back where you belong!' " he cried dismissively, jerking his thumb toward Palestine. " 'Oh, by the way, leave all your possessions behind.' "
... But I have no need of some artificial homeland invented by the British. I am not a German Jew, Agnes, but a Jewish German. — Mary Doria Russell

A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time. — Carl Sagan

Civil time' as the chronologists call it, has always been based on the rotation of the earth. But our sense of 'private' time is innate. Neurologists think that this sense of time, which is always of the present moment, is conditioned by our nervous systems. As we grow older, our nervous systems decelerate and our sense of personal time dawdles correspondingly ... This is why our lives seem to pass more quicly as we age. — William Boyd

Whether Hindus or Greeks, Egyptians or Japanese, Chinese, Sumerians, or ancient Americans
or even Romans, the most "modern" among people of antiquity
they all placed the Golden Age, the Age of Truth, the rule of Kronos or of Ra or of any other gods on earth
the glorious beginning of the slow, downward unfurling of history, whatever name it be given
far behind them in the past. — Savitri Devi

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time. — Bertrand Russell

The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? ... The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. — Cormac McCarthy

Centuries hence, when current social and political problems may seem as remote as the problems of the Thirty Years' War are to us, our age may be remembered chiefly for one fact: It was the time when the inhabitants of the earth first made contact with the vast cosmos in which their small planet is embedded. — Carl Sagan

New York! I say New York, let black blood flow into your blood.
Let it wash the rust from your steel joints, like an oil of life
Let it give your bridges the curve of hips and supple vines.
Now the ancient age returns, unity is restored,
The recociliation of the Lion and Bull and Tree
Idea links to action, the ear to the heart, sign to meaning.
See your rivers stirring with musk alligators
And sea cows with mirage eyes. No need to invent the Sirens.
Just open your eyes to the April rainbow
And your eyes, especially your ears, to God
Who in one burst of saxophone laughter
Created heaven and earth in six days,
And on the seventh slept a deep Negro sleep. — Leopold Sedar Senghor

We live in an age when selfinterest alone seems to determine all of man's acts - and what empathy, what emotion, what enthusiasm can ever grow out of self interest. It is pleasanter to dream of those times of dedication, sacrifice, and heroism that used to be, and that have left honorable traces upon the earth. — Germaine De Stael

For the pre-Darwinian age had come to be regarded as a Dark Age in which men still believed that the book of Genesis was a standard scientific treatise, and that the only additions to it were Galileo'a demonstration of Leonardo da Vinci's simple remark that the earth is a moon of the sun, Sir Humphrey Davy's invention of the safety lamp, the discovery of electricity, the application of steam to industrial purposes, and the penny post. — George Bernard Shaw

These are the times described in the Holy Bible as the "Last Judgement" and in the Koran as "Kiyama", the Resurrection time. Astrologically it is also called the Age of Aquarius, the time of rebirth and of great spiritual development on the Earth. — Nirmala Srivastava

Maybe they died of disease or lived on this island into old age, but no matter which, someone was the last man standing. — Jennifer Arnett

To talk, simply to talk! It sounds so little, and how much it is! When you have existed to the brink of middle age in bitter loneliness, among people to whom your true opinion on every subject on earth is blasphemy, the need to talk is the greatest of all needs. — George Orwell

This body is like the earth. Our bones are like mountains. Our belly is like the sea. Our flesh is like the dust and mud. The hair that grows on us is like plants, and the skin from which this hair grows is like arable land, and the area of our body where hair does not grow is akin to saline soil. Our sadness is like darkness and our laughter like sunlight. Sleep is brother to death. Our childhood is like spring, our youth like summer. Our maturity is like the autumn, our old age like the winter of life. All of our movements are like the stars moving in the sky. — Shems Friedlander

She yawned. If the Lords of Entropy were to manifest themselves on Earth again as they had in the legendary past she felt she might welcome them as a relief, at least, to her boredom. Not, of course, that she believed in those terrible prehistoric fables, though sometimes she could not help wishing that they had really existed and that she had lived in them, for they must surely have been more colourful and stimulating than this present age, where dull Reason drove bright Romance away: granite scattering mercury. — Michael Moorcock

When Isaiah predicted that spears would become pruning hooks, that's a reference to cultivating. Pruning and trimming and growing and paying close attention to the plants and whether they're getting enough water and if their roots are deep enough. Soil under the fingernails, grapes being trampled under bare feet, fingers sticky from handling fresh fruit.
It's that green stripe you get around the sole of your shoes when you mow the lawn.
Life in the age to come.
Earthy. — Rob Bell

As long as through the workings of laws and customs there exists a damnation-by-society artificially creating hells in the very midst of civilization and complicating destiny, which is divine, with a man-made fate; as long as the three problems of the age are not resolved: the debasement of men through proletarianization, the moral degradation of women through hunger, and the blighting of children by keeping them in darkness; as long as in certain strata social suffocation is possible; in other words and from an even broader perspective, as long as there are ignorance and poverty on earth, books of this kind may serve some purpose. Victor Hugo, Hauteville House, 1 January 1862 — Victor Hugo

We must learn to love ourselves less and the earth more. This will not be an easy task for we live in the age of nonsense. Bombarded with thousands of messages each day that proclaim how to be loved instead of how to be loving, we have learned to love objects instead of processes. — Steve Van Matre

The thin child knew enough fairy stories to know that a prohibition in a story is only there to be broken. The first humans were fated to eat the apple. The dice were loaded against them. The grandfather was pleased with himself. The thin child found no one in this story with whom to sympathise. Except maybe the snake, which had no asked to be made use of as a temper.
The snake wanted simply to coil about in the branches.
What was there in the beginning in the Asgard stories?
In the first age there was nothing. Nor sand, nor the sea, nor cold waves; there was no earth, no sky on high. The gulf galped and grass grew nowhere. — A.S. Byatt

All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. 19aGo therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, 20teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you balways, even to the end of the age. [19 — Anonymous

During the age Atlantis, there were only several hundred thousand people living on our planet. They lived in a sublime state of harmony with nature. At that time, because of the purity of the earth's aura, it was much easier to meditate. — Frederick Lenz

As an actor, I relish and delight in doing things that I'm not necessarily the demographic for. This is a demographic that is touching the psyche of a certain age group, facing the real internal questions of people who are going through rites of passage into adulthood. It's earth-shaking stuff. — Ray Stevenson

Thus this Earth resembles a great animall or rather an inanimate vegetable, draws in aethereal breath for its dayly refreshment and vitall ferment and transpires again grosses exhalations. And, according to the condition of all other things living, ought to have its time of beginning, youth, old age and perishing. — Isaac Newton

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done . . . 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world . . . Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak in time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, and not to yield. — Dan Simmons

The canyon is a ladder to the plain. The valley is pale in the end of July, when the corn and melons come of age and slowly the fields are made ready for the yield, and a faint, false air of autumn - an illusion still in the land - rises somewhere away in the high north country, a vague suspicion of red and yellow on the farthest summits. And the town lies out like a scattering of bones in the heart of the land, low in the valley, where the earth is a kiln and the soil is carried here and there in the wind and all harvests are a poor survival of the seed. It is a remote place, and divided from the rest of the world by a great forked range of mountains on the north and west; by wasteland on the south and east, a region of dunes and thorns and burning columns of air; and more than these by time and silence. — N. Scott Momaday

Say on, sayers! sing on, singers! Delve! mould! pile the words of the earth! Work on, age after age, nothing is to be lost, It may have to wait long, but it will certainly come in use, When the materials are all prepared and ready, the architects shall appear. — Walt Whitman

During the age of Atlantis, the low population density and the resulting purity of the earth's aura, made conditions ideal for discovering secret meditation techniques. — Frederick Lenz

On the day I swore to uphold the Hippocratic oath, the small hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I waited for lightning to strike. Who was I, vowing calmly among all these necktied young men to steal life out of nature's jaws, every old time we got half a chance and a paycheck? ... I could not accept the contract: that every child born human upon this earth comes with a guarantee of perfect health and old age clutched in its small fist. — Barbara Kingsolver

If those millions squandered on designing missionaries had been deposited in funds for the support of yourselves, when old age, misfortune, or sickness (from which none are exempt,) overtakes you, or for the distressed of your race, what a heaven of happiness you would have created on earth: ye would now be an ornament to your sex, and ages to come would call you blessed. But it is in vain to try - a priest-ridden female is lost to reason. Why? because she has surrendered her reason to the ... missionaries ... the orthodox; they are the grand deceivers ... — Anne Royall

We were fond together because of the sweep of open places, the taste of wide winds, the sunlight, and the hopes in which we worked. The morning freshness of the world-to-be intoxicated us. We were wrought up with ideas inexpressible and vaporous, but to be fought for. We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to remake in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep, and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace. — T.E. Lawrence

Imagine the presence of one who deeply loves you and is powerful enough to deal with the things you fear. It turns fear into confidence. But, like all spiritual growth, this change only comes with practice. It comes when you say, "Amen - I believe" when you hear or read the promises of God. It comes through meditation on God's words. It comes when the cross of Jesus Christ assures you that God is faithful. These words to the fearful are so important that Jesus makes them his final words on earth: "And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age" (Matt. 28:20). The resurrection is God's answer to fear. Jesus is alive. RESPONSE — Edward T. Welch

Dear Earth-dweller: Please use your BRAIN! As anyone KNOWS in this SCIENTIFIC age, the origin of the races is now WELL UNDERSTOOD! Africans traveled here after the DELUGE from Mercury, Asians from Venus, Caucasians from Mars, and the people of the Pacific islands from assorted asteroids. If you don't have the NECESSARY OCCULT SKILLS to project rays from the continents to the ASTRAL PLANE to verify this, a simple analysis of TEMPERAMENT and APPEARANCE should make this obvious even to YOU! But please don't put WORDS into MY mouth! Just because we're all from different PLANETS doesn't mean we can't still be FRIENDS. — Greg Egan

I may enter a zone of transcendence, in which I marvel at all the accidents of fate, since the beginning of life on earth, that led to my genes being created and my standing in this particular garden in a contemplative and imagining mind. I've been reading recently how reflection evolved. what a fascinating solution to the rigors of survival ... how amazing that a few basic ingredients- the same ones that form the mountains, plants, and rivers- when arranged differently and stressed could result in us.
More and more of late, I find myself standing outside of life, with a sense of the human saga laid out before me. it is a private vision, balanced between youth and old age, a vision in which I understand how caught up in striving we humans get, and a little of why, and how difficult it is even to recognize, since it feels integral to our nature and is. but I find it interesting that, according to many religions, life and begins and ends in a garden. — Diane Ackerman

When you grow up in middle America you are inculcated from the earliest age with the belief - no, the understanding - that America is the richest and most powerful nation on earth because God likes us best. It has the most perfect form of government, the most exciting sporting events, the tastiest food and amplest portions, the largest cars, the cheapest gasoline, the most abundant natural resources, the most productive farms, the most devastating nuclear arsenal and the friendliest, most decent and most patriotic folks on Earth. Countries just don't come any better. So why anyone would want to live anywhere else is practically incomprehensible. In a foreigner it is puzzling; in a native it is seditious. I used to feel this way myself. — Bill Bryson

For our age-old enemies await us always, just beyond our thin walls. Hunger, thirst, and cold lie waiting there, and forever among us are those who would loot, rape, and maim rather than behave as civilized men.
If we sit secure this hour, this day, it is because the thin walls of the law stand between us and evil. A jolt of the earth, a revolution, an invasion or even a violent upset in our own government can reduce all to chaos, leaving civilized man naked and exposed. — Louis L'Amour

The worst part is wondering how you'll find the strength tomorrow
to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much
too long, where you'll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it's treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn't enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself. — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

If the Soul sees, after death , what passes on this earth , and watches over the welfare of those it loves, then must its greatest happiness consist in seeing the current of its beneficent influences widening out from age to age, as rivulets widen into rivers, and aiding to shape the destinies of individuals, families, States, the World; and its bitterest punishment, in seeing its evil influences causing mischief and misery , and cursing and afflicting men, long after the frame it dwelt in has become dust, and when both name and memory are forgotten. — Albert Pike

Being a woman, I have found the road rougher than had I been born a man. Different defenses, different codes of ethics, different approaches to problems and personalities are a woman's lot. I have preferred to shun what is known as feminine wiles, the subterfuge of subtlety, reliance on tears and coquetry to shape my way. I am forthright, often blunt. I have learned to be a realist despite my romantic, emotional nature. I have no illusions that age, the rigors of my profession, disappointments, and unfulfilled dreams have not left their mark.

I am proud that I have carved my path on earth almost entirely by my own efforts, proud that I have compromised in my career only when I had no other recourse, when financial or contractual commitments dictated. Proud that I have never been involved in a physical liaison unless I was deeply attracted or in love. Proud that, whatever my worldly goods may be, they have been achieved by my own labors. — Joan Fontaine

Flowers belong to Fairyland: the flowers and the birds and the butterflies are all that the world has kept of its golden age
the only perfectly beautiful things on earth
joyous, innocent, half divine
useless, say they who are wiser than God. — Ouida

It was not only from Europe that so much could be learned! This modern age had provided many breasts to suckle me - from among the Natives themselves, from Japan, China, America, India, Arabia, from all the peoples on the face of this earth ... In humility, I realized I am a child of all nations, of all ages, past and present. Place and time of birth, parents, all are coincidence: such things are not sacred. — Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Ours is peculiarly an age of irreverence, and as the consequence, the spirit of lawlessness, which brooks no restraint and which is desirous of casting off everything which interferes with the free course of self-will, is rapidly engulfing the earth like some giant tidal — Arthur W. Pink

It is natural to suppose that global warming would act as a useful counterweight to the Earth's tendency to plunge back into glacial conditions. However, as Kolbert has pointed out, when you are confronted with a fluctuating and unpredictable climate, 'the last thing you'd want to do is conduct a vast unsupervised experiment on it'. It has even been suggested, with more plausibility than would at first seem evident, that an ice age might actually be induced by a rise in temperatures. The idea is that a slight warming would enhance evaporation rates and increase cloud cover, leading in the higher latitudes to more persistent accumulations of snow. In fact, global warming could plausibly, if paradoxically, lead to powerful localized cooling in North America and northern Europe. — Bill Bryson

The wind and the grass and something in the sky, sun, or moon, shining on our backs as we run: They are gifts that humans toss away like socks on Christmas morning, because we see them every day and don't think of them as gifts anymore. But new socks are always better than old socks. And the wind and grass and sky, I think, are better seen with new eyes than jaded ones. I hope my eyes will never grow old. — Kevin Hearne

We're finally going to get the bill for the Industrial Age. If the projections are right, it's going to be a big one: the ecological collapse of the planet. — Jeremy Rifkin

If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also. Thus he believed that children were indeed the kingdom of heaven, but nevertheless ought to be obedient to the kingdom of earth. He admired youth because it was young and age because it was not. It is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man. — G.K. Chesterton

When the years are dying in the arms of your life,
the earth is in pain moving around the sun. — Munia Khan

It would be worthy of the age to print together the collected Scriptures or Sacred Writings of the several nations, the Chinese, the Hindoos, the Persians, the Hebrews, and others, as the Scripture of mankind. The New Testament is still, perhaps, too much on the lips and in the hearts of men to be called a Scripture in this sense. Such a juxtaposition and comparison might help to liberalize the faith of men ... This would be the Bible, or Book of Books, which let the missionaries carry to the uttermost parts of the earth. — Henry David Thoreau

In the age of networked everything, life moves sideways and covers lots of ground while barely touching the earth. — Walter Kirn

If utopia was illusion hypostasized, communism, going still further, will be illusion decreed, imposed: a challenge to the omnipresence of evil, an obligatory optimism. A man will find it hard to accommodate himself to it if he lives, by dint of ordeals and experiments, in the intoxication of disappointment and if, like the author of Genesis, he is reluctant to identify the Age of Gold with the future, with becoming. Not that he scorns the fanatics of "infinite progress" and their efforts to make justice prevail here on earth; but he knows, to his misery, that justice is a material impossibility, a grandiose meaninglessness, the only ideal about which we can declare quite certainly that it will never be realized, and against which nature and society seem to have mobilized all their laws. — Emil Cioran

I was five years old; I got addicted to being on stage. I felt like it was the most wonderful place on Earth, performing in front of an audience, who in this case were a bunch of classmates, kids my age. — Shakira

The rooks were sailing about the cathedral towers; and the towers themselves, overlooking many a long unaltered mile of the rich country and its pleasant streams, were cutting the bright morning air as if there were no such thing as change on earth. Yet the bells, when they sounded told me sorrowfully of change in everything; told me of their own age, and my pretty Dora's youth; and of the many, never old, who had lived and loved and died, while the reverberations of the bells had hummed through the rusty armour of the Black Prince hanging up within, and, motes upon the deep of Time, had lost themselves in air, as circles do in water. — Charles Dickens

This prophecy of a coming enlightenment is echoed in virtually every faith and philosophical tradition on Earth. Hindus call it the Krita Age, astrologers call it the Age of Aquarius, the Jews describe the coming of the Messiah, theosophists call it the New Age, cosmologists call it Harmonic Convergence and predict the actual date of December 21, 2012. — Dan Brown

What we heard was not the fabulous note of any buried blasphemy of elder earth from whose supernal toughness an age-denied polar sun had evoked a monstrous response. — H.P. Lovecraft

An Ice Age is coming and I welcome it as much-needed changing. I see no solution to our ruination of earth except for a drastic reduction of the human population. — David Foreman

At the round earth's imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go ;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, dea[r]th, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space ;
For, if above all these my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,
When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent, for that's as good
As if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood.
— John Donne

Ages are mere reminders of the hours logged on this earth and the precious time remaining. — Casper Smart

Another point important to recognize is that the creation was 'mature' from its birth. It did not have to grow or develop from simple beginnings. God formed it full-grown in every respect, including even Adam and Eve as mature individuals when they were first formed. The whole universe had an 'appearance of age' right from the start. It could not have been otherwise for true creation to have taken place. 'Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them' (Genesis 2:1). — Henry M. Morris