"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."

6 likes

Source: Hugh Miller, Harriet Myrtle (1859). “Sketch book of popular geology: Popular geology: A series of lectures read before the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh”, p.123

About the author

Hugh Miller

Geologist, Author

Hugh Miller was a Scottish geologist and writer known for his influential work in geology and his passionate advocacy for the natural sciences.

All quotes by Hugh Miller →

Same author

More quotes by Hugh Miller

See all →
Hugh Miller Geologist, Author

"Poets need be in no degree jealous of the geologists. The stony science, with buried creations for its domains, and half an eternity charged with its annals, possesses its realms of dim and shadowy fields, in which troops of fancies already walk like disembodied ghosts in the old fields of Elysium, and which bid fair to be quite dark and uncertain enough for all the purposes of poesy for centuries to come."

Read quote
Hugh Miller Geologist, Author

"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."

Read quote
Hugh Miller Geologist, Author

"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."

Read quote