Hugh Miller Quotes

#1. Donald had reached its further edge, and could hear the rush of the stream from the deep obscurity of the abyss below, when there rose from the opposite side a strain of the most delightful music he had ever heard.

Hugh Miller

#2. 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

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

Hugh Miller

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. They were, I doubt not, happy enough in their dark stalls, because they were horses, and had plenty to eat; and I was at times quite happy enough in the dark loft, because I was a man, and could think and imagine.

Hugh Miller

#8. The existing premises, wholly altered by geologic science, are no longer those of Hume. The foot-print in the sand-to refer to his happy illustration-does 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

#9. 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

#10. But the advice was not taken - Johnstone did emigrate to Canada, and did mortgage his pension; and I fear - though I failed to trace his after history - that he suffered in consequence.

Hugh Miller

#11. 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

#12. Problems are only opportunities with thorns on them.

Hugh Miller

#13. Their humble dwellings were of their own rearing; it was they themselves who had broken in their little fields; from time immemorial, far beyond the reach of history, had they possessed their mountain holdings.

Hugh Miller

#14. 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

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

Hugh Miller

#16. Save for thee and thy lessons, man in society would everywhere sink into a sad compound of the fiend and the wild beast; and this fallen world would be as certainly a moral as a natural wilderness.

Hugh Miller