GC Problem Observation, Listening, and Curiosity
Geoscience
Type Quotes
Tranio is advising his master Lucentio on the best way to go about his programme of self improvement. “The jewel that we find, we stoop and take't Because we see it: but what we do not see We tread upon, and never think of it...…”
-William Shakespeare
I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
-Ernest Hemingway
I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.
-Eleanor Roosevelt
To behold is not necessarily to observe, and the power of comparing and combining is only to be obtained by education. It is much to be regretted that habits of exact observation are not cultivated in our schools; to this deficiency may be traced much of the fallacious reasoning, the false philosophy which prevails.
-Alexander Von Humboldt
The true explorationist must get out of the office, go into the field, the plains, and valleys, traverse the woods, and the mountains, and the seashores; he must look hard at the rocks, and at any other “signs of nature” that he can find.
-John Walker
I roamed the countryside searching for answers to things I did not understand. Why shells existed on the tops of mountains along with the imprints of coral and plants and seaweed usually found in the sea. Why the thunder lasts a longer time than that which causes it, and why immediately on its creation the lightning becomes visible to the eye while thunder requires time to travel. How the various circles of water form around the spot which has been struck by a stone, and why a bird sustains itself in the air. These questions and other strange phenomena engage my thought throughout my life.
-Leonardo DaVinci
When we stopped at the outcrops, he quietly examined them, detecting details which I would have overlooked pointing at features that immediately appeared to me as keys to understanding geological situations which heretofore were confusing --- all that without standing in a pulpit or lecturing, always questioning himself about his own observations, the unmistakable sign of a true man of science.
-Of Hollis D. Hedberg by Giovanni Flores.
To behold is not necessarily to observe, and the power of comparing and combining is only to be obtained by education. It is much to be regretted that habits of exact observation are not cultivated in our schools; to this deficiency may be traced much of the fallacious reasoning, the false philosophy which prevails.
- Alexander Von Humboldt
Geology... offers always some material for observation.... [When] spring and summer come round, how easily may the hammer be buckled round the waist, and the student emerge from the dust of town into the joyous air of the country, for a few delightful hours among the rocks.
-Archibald Geikie
It seems to me that the dominant characteristic of man, the reasoning animal is curiosity... further, it seems to me, the nature of men differing as they do, the curiosity of one man may be more tightly focused in a single direction while that of another, equally curious, may be more diffuse. The single tracker is properly endowed to become a great scientist…..A man of many curiosities is certainly more likely to become broadly developed man which is ideal.
-Everette Lee De Golyer
... the great Appalachian mountains show in many places, near the highest parts of them, strata of sea-shell, in some places the mark of them are in solid rock. It is certainly the wreck of a world we live on!
-Benjamin Franklin (1755)
My life-long ambition is to stay curious, to keep learning and to give back.
-Astronaut Kathryn D Sullivan
Begin by conditioning yourself to be restless and uneasy about the status quo. Don't overlook the familiar just because you've seen it so often.
-Jack Oliver
Study Nature not books.
-Louis Agassiz
The past history of our globe must be explained by what can be seen to be happening now. No powers are to be employed that are not natural to the globe, no action to be admitted except those of which we know the principle.
-James Hutton
All knowledge that is not the real product of observation, or of consequences deduced from observation, is entirely groundless and illusory.
-Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.
-Albert Einstein
