Sand And Rock Quotes

“I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself!.. And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience, became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see, and seeing the secret, you are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on towards nowhere for no good reason.”

— Eugene O'Neill

“The Bible talks about building houses on sand and rock, but says nothing about a brick house built on a blanket.”

— Nicole McKay

“If from the beginning you always believed that a ticket was only one-way, then you wouldn't have to try so vainly to cling to the sand like an oyster to a rock.”

— Kōbō Abe

“My epiphany: Printed words were the shadows of referents. Things: rock, sand, onion. Ideas: carpool, justice, maximization, irrevocability. Paragraphs were composite shadows of the scenarios and subjects they captured: the overwhelming richness and messiness of the world distilled to bare, chiaroscuroed necessity.”

— Tim Horvath

“It wallowed in its water-bed; it burrowed, heaved and swung;
It gnawed its way ahead with grunts and sighs;
Its bill of fare was rock and sand; the tailings were its dung;
It glared around with fierce electric eyes.
Full fifty buckets crammed its maw;
it bellowed out for more;
It looked like some great monster in the gloom.”

— Robert W. Service

“Why, these men would destroy the Bible on evidence that would not convict a habitual criminal of a misdemeanor. They found a tooth in a sand pit in Nebraska with no other bones about it, and from that one tooth decided that it was the remains of the missing link. They have queer ideas about age too. They find a fossil and when they are asked how old it is they say they can't tell without knowing what rock it was in, and when they are asked how old the rock is they say they can't tell unless they know how old the fossil is.”

— William Jennings Bryan

“It takes time to see the desert; you have to keep looking at it. When you've looked long neough, you realise the blank wastes of sand and rock are teemming with life. Just as you can keep looking at a person and suddenly realise that the way you see them has completely changed: from being a stranger, they've gradually revealed themselves as someone with a wealth of complexities and surprising subtleties that you're growing to love.”

— Annie Caulfield

“Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you
beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.”

— Edward Abbey

“Water, water, water ... There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount , a perfect ratio of water to rock, water to sand, insuring that wide free open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.”

— Edward Abbey

“Mother is the rock, I am the ocean. I have to pout and roll my eyes for hours until she finally wears down and crumbles into a thousand grains of beach sand. It takes a lot of energy. I don't think I have it in me.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

“You think you cannot live anymore. You think that the light of your soul has been put out and that you will stay in the dark forever. But when you are engulfed by such solid darkness, when you have both eyes closed to the world, a third eye opens in your heart. And only then do you come to realize that eyesight conflicts with inner knowledge. No eye sees so clear and sharp as the eye of love. After grief comes another season, another valley, another you. And the lover who is nowhere to be found, you start to see everywhere.
You see him in the drop of water that falls into the ocean, in the high tide that follows the waxing of the moon, or in the morning wind that spreads its fresh smell; you see him in the geomancy symbols in the sand, in the tiny particles of rock glittering under the sun, in the smile of a newborn baby, or in your throbbing vein. How can you say Shams is gone when he is everywhere and in everything?”

— Elif Shafak

“The rockets set the bony meadows afire, turned rock to lava, turned wood to charcoal, transmuted water to steam, made sand and silica into green glass which lay like shattered mirrors reflecting the invasion, all about. The rockets came like drums, beating in the night. The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke.”

— Ray Bradbury

“It's a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is sand.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

“Yeah, I was just curious. I concentrated on my footsteps.
Yeah, well, next time you think about stepping into rock concerts you might want to bring a bodyguard.
I stopped and turned around. I brought my hands to my hips, a bit offended. What is that supposed to mean?
He dropped the end of the bat into the sand.
It means your small.”

— Holly Hood

“There's a biblical story where Jesus says we can build our house on sand or we can build it on rock. Our house is our emotional stability. When it is built on sand, then the winds and rain can tear it down. One disappointing phone call and we crumble; one storm and the house falls down. When our house is built on rock, then it is sturdy and strong and the storms can't destroy it.”

— Marianne Williamson

“Some little pieces of sand are so full of ego that they see themselves as a giant rock! But then the wind blows, the big ego flies in the air!”

— Mehmet Murat Ildan

“Every time a strong wind blows, every sand and dust yearns for being a solid rock and every solid rock longs for flying with the wind!”

— Mehmet Murat Ildan

“We Americans think, in every country in transition, there's a Thomas Jefferson hiding behind some rock or a James Madison beyond one sand dune.”

— Joe Biden

“The house built on the sand may oftentimes be built higher, have more fair parapets and battlements, windows and ornaments, than that which is built upon the rock; yet all gifts and privileges equal not one grace.”

— John Owen

“A mile below the lowest cloud, rock breaches water and the sea begins.
It has been given many names. Each inlet and bay and stream has been classified as if it were discrete. But it is one thing, where borders are absurd. It fills the space between stones and sand, curling around coastlines and filling trenches between the continents.”

— China Miéville

“Second Fig
Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!”

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

“The Wise and Foolish Builders 24Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. 26But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”

— Anonymous.

“We grew up listening to alternative music from the '90s, and there was no shame in being on a major label and still making the music you wanted to make. I feel like rap rock came around and drew a line in the sand, and everybody that was like me ran away from that and started making indie-rock.”

— Nate Ruess

“The new era began; the king was tried, doomed, and beheaded; the Republic of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death, declared for victory or death against the world in arms; the black flag waved night and day from the great towers of Notre Dame; three hundred thousand men, summoned to rise against the tyrants of the earth, rose from all the varying soils of France, as if the dragon's teeth had been sown broadcast, and had yielded fruit equally on hill and plain, on rock, in gravel, and alluvial mud, under the bright sky of the South and under the clouds of the North, in fell and forest, in the vineyards and the olive-grounds and among the cropped grass and the stubble of the corn, along the fruitful banks of the broad rivers, and in the sand of the sea-shore.”

— Charles Dickens

“I have hair that drifts like seaweed when I swim. I have eyes that shine like rock pools. My ears are like scallop shells. The ripples on my skin are like the ripples on the sand when the tide has turned back again. At night I gleam and glow like sea beneath the stars and moon. Thoughts dart and dance inside like little minnows in the shallows. They race and flash like mackerel farther out. My wonderings roll in the deep like sails. Dreams dive each night into the dark like dolphins do and break out happy and free into the morning light. These are the things I know about myself and that I see when I look in the rock pools at myself.”

— David Almond

“I've always been an incredibly physically capable human being. I've always had good control of my body, walk a hundred feet on my hands, jump off rock wall and do a back flip into the sand. That's always been who I am.”

— Casey Neistat

“What geomancy reads what the windblown sand writes on the desert rock? I read there that all things live by a generous power and dance to a mighty tune; or I read there all things are scattered and hurled, that our every arabesque and grand jete is a frantic variation on our one free fall.”

— Annie Dillard

“I am pleased enough with the surfaces - in fact they alone seem to me to be of much importance. Such things for example as the grasp of a child's hand in your own, the flavor of an apple, the embrace of a friend or lover, the silk of a girl's thigh, the sunlight on the rock and leaves, the feel of music, the bark of a tree, the abrasion of granite and sand, the plunge of clear water into a pool, the face of the wind - what else is there? What else do we need?”

— Edward Abbey

“Whatever's most important to you is your god. If it's not the Rock Christ Jesus, then it's sand!”

— Raymond Berry

“If you can reincarnate, what do you wanna be in your next life? I think I want to become a rock. A stone has no troubles and lives a simple life. The worst that could happen would be being stepped on, but that won't hurt. Am I right? What about you? What are you thinking? I've already thought it over for you. You'll become the wind. Because the wind is one of the world's cleanest things. Moreover, the wind can blow upon the rock, moving it. As it blows, the rock will eventually turn into sand. This way, the sand and wind can be together. Sand and wind are meant to be together.”

— Ah Ken

“Wilderness has been characterized as barren and unproductive; little can be grown in its sand and rock. But the crops of wilderness have always been its spiritual values - silence and solitude, a sense of awe and gratitude - able to be harvested by any traveler who visits.”

— David Douglas

“When I see the sea again
has the sea seen me or hasn't it seen me?
Why the waves ask me
The same that I ask them?
And why do they hit the rock
With such a futile enthusiasm?
Don't they get tired of repeating
their declaration to the sand?”

— Pablo Neruda

“May your character not be a writing upon the sand, but an inscription upon the rock!”

— Charles Haddon Spurgeon

“Real friends are very special, but you have to be careful because sometimes you have a friend and you think they are made of rock, then suddenly you realise they're only made of sand.”

— Maria Callas

“Nothing erodes [a mother's love]. It is not sand on a beach. It is the nuclear heart of things-hard as the rock of this earth.”

— Beth Kephart

“All self-effort is but sinking sand. Christ alone is the Rock of our salvation.”

— Henry Allen Ironside

“We figure to ourselves The thing we like; and then we build it up, As chance will have it, on the rock or sand,- For thought is tired of wandering o'er the world, And homebound Fancy runs her bark ashore.”

— Henry Taylor

“Precept is instruction written in the sand; the tide flows over it and the record is gone; example is graven on the rock, and the lesson is not soon lost.”

— William Ellery Channing

“He who, having lost one ideal, refuses to give his heart and soul to another and nobler, is like a man who declines to build a house on the rock because the wind and rain have ruined his house on the sand.”

— Constance Naden

“To build your house on the rock is to hear what Jesus says and obey. To be foolish and build your house on the sand is to hear and ignore.”

— Kevin DeYoung

“Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment.”

— Mark Twain

“You know the words from the Bible: 'Build not on sand, but on rock ... ' Tyrant leaders respect only firmness ... and laugh at persons who give in to them.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“The canyon country does not always inspire love. To many it appears barren, hostile, repellent - a fearsome mostly waterless land of rock and heat, sand dunes and quicksand, cactus, thornbrush, scorpion, rattlesnake, and agaraphobic distances. To those who see our land in that manner, the best reply is, yes, you are right, it is a dangerous and terrible place. Enter at your own risk. Carry water. Avoid the noonday sun. Try to ignore the vultures. Pray frequently.”

— Edward Abbey

“The Sahara was a spectacle as alive as the sea. The tints of the dunes changed according to the time of day and the angle of the light: golden as apricots from far off, when we drove close to them they turned to freshly made butter; behind us they grew pink; from sand to rock, the materials of which the desert was made varied as much as its tints ...”

— Simone De Beauvoir

“Maybe roll in the sand with a rock and roll man.”

— Jimmy Buffett

“Let each of us accept the truth of the following statement and try to make it our most fundamental principle: Christ's teaching will never let us down, while worldly wisdom always will. Christ Himself said that this sort of wisdom was like a house with nothing but sand as its foundation, while His own was like a building with solid rock as its foundation.”

— Vincent De Paul

“Change begets change. Nothing propagates so fast. If a man habituated to a narrow circle of cares and pleasures, out of which he seldom travels, step beyond it, though for never so brief a space, his departure from the monotonous scene on which he has been an actor of importance would seem to be the signal for instant confusion. The mine which Time has slowly dug beneath familiar objects is sprung in an instant; and what was rock before, becomes but sand and dust.”

— Charles Dickens

“We would labor earnestly to raise a believer in salvation by free will into a believer in salvation by grace, for we long to see all religious teaching built upon the solid rock of truth and not upon the sand of imagination. At the same time, our grand object is not the revision of opinions, but the regeneration of natures. We should bring men to Christ, not to our own particular views of Christianity.”

— Charles Spurgeon

“I did not imitate the skeptics who doubt only for doubting's sake, and pretend to be always undecided; on the contrary, my whole intention was to arrive at a certainty, and to dig away the drift and the sand until I reached the rock or the clay beneath.”

— Rene Descartes

“It is trial that proves one thing weak and another strong. A house built on the sand is in fair weather just as good as if builded on a rock. A cobweb is as good as the mightiest cable when there is no strain upon it.”

— Henry Ward Beecher