Glaciers are massive ice bodies that move due to their weight and are both a spectacular natural phenomenon and a source of inspiration.
Many admire their beauty and some dream of adventures like scuba diving in arctic glaciers.
However these glaciers are melting rapidly due to global warming and pollution.
Over the years numerous individuals have used glacier analogies in literature and speeches highlighting life’s beauty and the importance of sustainable living.
These glacier quotes often reflect on the planet’s ancient history and our big role in the vastness of nature emphasizing that humans are part of nature not separate from it.
This perspective encourages a deeper appreciation and more meaningful co-existence with our environment.
For those who’ve experienced these majestic glaciers sharing photos with fitting glacier quotes on Instagram can capture their awe-inspiring beauty and the profound lessons they teach us.
Let’s get started.
Beautiful Glacier Quotes
There’s just something beautiful about walking on snow that nobody else has walked on. ~ Carol Rifka Brunt.
I want to gaze at the Five Treasures of Snows; Kanchenjunga, that rears up like a frozen wave of ice. ~ Susan Jagannath.
Nothing lives long, only the earth and mountains. ~ Dee Brown.
As warmth makes even glaciers trickle, and opens streams in the ribs of frozen mountains, so the heart knows the full flow and life of its grief only when it begins to melt and pass away. ~ Henry Ward Beecher.
Huge events take place on this earth every day. Earthquakes, hurricanes, even glaciers move. So why couldn’t he just look at me? ~ Claire Danes.
Flooding in low-lying coastal areas. Threat of global warming. Melting of glaciers. Rising sea-level. Warning. ~ Shweta Gupta.
To walk in nature is to witness a thousand miracles. ~ Mary Davis.
See Also: Mountain Quotes
Nature’s most perfect neutral, Glacier Gray is a shade that is timeless. Quietly assuring and peacefully relaxing, Glacier Gray, is above all, constant. ~ Leatrice Eiseman.
On 15 July 2007, I swam across an open patch of sea at the North Pole to highlight the melting of the Arctic sea ice. ~ Lewis Gordon Pugh
Mountains are not fair or unfair, they are dangerous. ~ Reinhold Messner
Snow always makes me think of ice cream. Glaciers look like where it’s dribbled. ~ Jane Wilson-Howarth.
We try to make children problem-solvers. That gave birth to solar-heated mud buildings, using greenhouses to grow things and ice stupas – artificial baby glaciers. ~ Sonam Wangchuk.
Inspirational Glaciers Quotes
Writing is like the life of a glacier; one eternal grind. ~ John Muir.
This air we breathe is precious, and the glaciers helped me understand that and stay focused on that. ~ James Balog
In just 25 years the glaciers in the Himalayas which provide water for three-quarters of a billion people could disappear entirely. ~ Gordon Brown
Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier. ~ Barbara Kingsolver.
My first travel experiences were around New Zealand. The scenery is stunning at Milford Sound and Potts Glacier. ~ Monica Galetti.
My dad, a geologist, was an expert in glaciers and permafrost, so we moved to a lot of cold places such as Canada, Iceland and Norway. ~ Lucy Worsley
Stop-motion is filmmaking at the pace of a glacier. In live action, you’re moving so quickly. ~ Travis Knight
You could engineer a human to survive the greenhouse effect because you think that’s what’s going to happen, and then all of a sudden the glaciers are creeping down on you. ~ Paul Di Filippo.
Also Read: Nature Quotes
Before the reader turns his back upon the Grand Basin once for all, I should like to put a name upon the glacier it contains -since it is the fashion to name glaciers. ~ Hudson Stuck
There’s a reason why Jules Verne chose the place where the glacier was, where we start to descend into the center of the earth. That area specifically has magical powers and people come to this place from all over the world. I actually think that’s true of all Iceland. I think it’s so special, apart from the water and air being so clean. ~ Anita Briem
Glaciers are delicate and individual things, like humans. Instability is built into them. ~ Will Harrison
Something in her small eyes caught the sunlight and glistened, like a glacier on the faraway face of a mountain. ~ Haruki Murakami.
Quotes about Glaciers
I do stupid stuff like that: I’ll call my wife from the road, send her pictures of glaciers. ~ Adam Ferrara
When you get out onto a glacier that’s the size of Northern Ireland and it’s so vast, and you’re standing on top of it and you can see forever, it’s so pure and clear that you can see for miles and miles and miles. You really do think, Wow, there is a god! You feel very humbled. ~ Richard Dormer
If we moved from industrialized agriculture to re-localized organic agriculture, we could sequester about one quarter of the carbon moving into the air and destroying our glaciers, oceans, forests and lands. ~ Winona LaDuke
Remember, the Arctic didn’t have any ice. And the Northwest Passage was wide open. They were raising grapes in Scotland for God sakes, had a huge winery. Iceland was a farming community. As some of the glaciers retreated they found villages that were covered with ice. ~ Don Young
The last time the world was three degrees warmer than today-which is what we expect later this century-sea levels were 25m higher. So that is what we can look forward to if we don’t act soon. ~ James Hansen
Was it because a lot of the heat went into melting Arctic sea ice or parts of Greenland and Antarctica, and other glaciers? Was it because the heat was buried in the ocean and sequestered, perhaps well below the surface?…Perhaps all of these things are going on?~ Kevin E. Trenberth
Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate. ~ Albert Schweitzer
Glacial pace is actually an incorrect concept. The glaciers move a lot faster and they react a lot faster than people imagine. ~ James Balog
Always rope up on glaciers where there is even a slight chance of falling into a crevasse. No pure free soloing. Never climb below hanging glaciers. ~ Tommy Caldwell
The prediction that glaciers will be gone from Glacier National Park has been moved up by 10 years to 2020, the same year it’s predicted the Arctic Sea will be ice-free in the summer. ~ Bill Kurtis
One learns that the world, though made, is yet being made. That this is still the morning of creation. That mountains, long conceived, are now being born, brought to light by the glaciers, channels traced for coming rivers, basins hollowed for lakes. ~ John Muir
There was no more grass, no flowers, not even any moss: dusty granite blocks covered the ice and an occasional grinding groan reminded us that we were on a slow-moving glacier. ~ Chris Bonington
I believe Ronald Reagan can make this country what it once was… a large Arctic region covered with ice. ~ Robin Williams
I haven’t been to Tasmania. I haven’t been to the South Pole, and I haven’t been to the North Pole. I want to see the polar bear migration before there are no polar bears. I want to see Glacier National Park before the glacier melts. ~ Martha Stewart
We estimate that there are perhaps 20,000 prehistoric hunter-gatherers frozen up in those glaciers. Now, if they simply thaw and wander around, it’s not a problem, but if they find a leader -a Captain Caveman, if you will -we’ll be facing an even more serious problem. ~ John Hodgman
I am involved in making measurements in polar oceans, and they are changing more than anything else. I think we have to be prepared for major changes associated with the melting of floating ice and the melting of the Greenland glacier. ~ Walter Munk
As someone who grew up in a logging and rail town and hiking in Glacier National Park, I am honored and humbled to be asked to serve Montana and America as secretary of interior. ~ Ryan Zinke
Grieve not the Christ of God, who redeems us; and remember that we grieve Him most when we will not let Him pour His love upon us, but turn a sullen, unresponsive unbelief towards His pleading grace, as some glacier shuts out the sunshine from the mountain-side with its thick-ribbed ice. ~ Alexander MacLaren.
Best Glacier Quotes
We now know that we cannot continue to put ever-increasing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Actions have consequences. In fact, the consequences of past actions are already in the pipeline. Global temperatures are rising. Glaciers are melting. Sea levels are rising. Extreme weather events are multiplying. ~ Cary Fowler
As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of the world. ~ Anna Kavan.
I went to Alaska a while back and surfed the waves generated from a glacier calving and ever since then, I’ve never been afraid in the ocean. ~ Garrett McNamara
Adulthood is a glacier encroaching quietly on youth. When it arrives, the stamp of childhood suddenly freezes, capturing us for good in the image of our last act, the pose we struck when the ice of age set in. ~ Ian Caldwell
She’s heard that the glaciers in the Alaska territory hold such an extraordinary azure color they seem to have trapped the sky beneath the ice. ~ Jennie Fields
It’s like boxing a glacier. Enjoy that metaphor, by the way, because your grandchildren will have no idea what a glacier is. ~ Stephen Colbert
This thing I’m doing can hardly be called living. Instead I’m lying dormant, like a bacterium in a glacier. Getting time over with. That’s all. ~ Margaret Atwood
There is a glacier in Iceland, Solheimar, which has retreated a great deal, and every time I go back there and see what’s not there any more, it does something to the heart. It makes you realise it’s possible for a gigantic natural element to just disappear. ~ James Balog
I’m telling you that there are people in parts of the world -in Africa today, they fight each other over water. They kill each over it. And if glaciers are melting and there’s less water available and more people, that is a challenge we have to face. ~ John F. Kerry
When I was about 24, I went to Reykjavik with Benedict Cumberbatch for a few days. We took a three-hour coach ride to a glacier and raced on snowmobiles at 60mph. ~ Mathew Horne
Maybe she’ll bring him lunch, like she used to. Surprise him with fresh steak or ribs. Or she’ll keep driving to places where there is no development, no dirt to move. She will find a glacier, where her skin can adopt the pale blue of the ice. ~ Ryan W. Bradley
The Arctic has huge glaciers, frozen waterfalls and floating ice. This is scenery on which man has left no mark, which has stayed unchanged for centuries, wild, bleak, hauntingly beautiful; it is a part of God’s creation we have made no effort to tame. ~ Ann Widdecombe.
Lovely Glaciers Quotes
He (Jeremy Clarkson) is the last man standing on the beach commanding the glaciers’ melt waters to go back. ~ A. A. Gill
The overwhelming pressure of mediocrity, sluggish and indomitable as a glacier, will mitigate the most violent, and depress the most exalted revolution. ~ T. S. Eliot
Where the glacier meets the sky, the land ceases to be earthly, and the earth becomes one with the heavens; no sorrows live there anymore, and therefore joy is not necessary; beauty alone reigns there, beyond all demands. ~ Halldór Laxness.
Just because you see pictures of glaciers falling into the ocean doesn’t mean anything bad is happening. This is something that happens all the time. It’s part of the natural cycle of things. We know from measurements that glaciers have been melting for 200 years at least. ~ Freeman Dyson
There is no more sagacious animal than the Icelandic horse. He is stopped by neither snow, nor storm, nor impassable roads, nor rocks, glaciers, or anything. He is courageous, sober, and surefooted. He never makes a false step, never shies. ~ Jules Verne
Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the teacup opens A lane to the land of the dead. ~ W. H. Auden.
The ‘New Yorker’ asked me to shoot a story on climate change in 2005, and I wound up going to Iceland to shoot a glacier. The real story wasn’t the beautiful white top. It ended up being at the terminus of the glacier where it’s dying. ~ James Balog
I didn’t learn to swim until I was 21 or something because I grew up in the mountains in Wyoming and all the water is glacier runoff and cold. ~ Matthew Fox
The retreat and disappearance of glaciers—there are only 160,000 left—means we’re burning libraries and damaging the planet, possibly beyond repair. Bit by bit, glacier by glacier, rib by rib, we’re living the Fall. ~ Gretel Ehrlich
Future generations are not going to ask us what political party you were in. They are going to ask what you did about it when you knew the glaciers were melting. ~ Martin Sheen
The alpine environment is very delicate. I’ve been able to see change in the mountains in the 20 years that I’ve been climbing full-time. Glaciers have receded. The tree-line is changing. That’s very rapid to see nature changing in a 20-year period. ~ Conrad Anker
As the ice shelves are disintegrating, the glaciers that are feeding them from the land are surging forward. ~ Robert Gilbert
The glacier was God’s great plough set at work ages ago to grind, furrow, and knead over, as it were, the surface of the Earth. ~ Louis Agassiz
With 586,400 square miles, Alaska is the largest state in the U.S. It’s home to over half the world’s glaciers, the highest mountain in North America, 29 volcanoes, and over 33,000 miles of coastline. Only around 700,000 people live there, so I would say there’s lots of room for adventure. ~ Rusty Wilson
Sea level rise and destruction of water resources as glaciers melt alone may have horrendous human consequences. ~ Noam Chomsky
The Himalayan glaciers, China’s trade surplus, Olympic ice hockey -the world is full of pressing subjects that people never consult me about. ~ Elif Batuman
The finest of the glacier meadow gardens lie …imbedded in the upper pine forests like lakes of light. ~ John Muir.
Thought-Provoking Glacier Quotes
Not using fly ash in our highways would just be a plain waste of taxpayers’ money, which I find unacceptable. Most people don’t realize that without fly ash, many of Montana’s infrastructure projects simply would not have been possible – like the Hungry Horse Dam near Glacier National Park. ~ Matt Rosendale
In Alaska, the beaches are slumping so much, people are having to move houses. In Tuktoyaktuk, the land is starting to go under water. The glaciers are melting and the permafrost is melting. ~ Sheila Watt-Cloutier
In the Andes and the Alps, I have seen melting glaciers. At both of the Earth’s Poles, I have seen open sea where ice once dominated the horizon. ~ Ban Ki-moon
To get the feel of the polar night, I went back to Spitsbergen in winter. I went snowshoeing in the dark and experimented with headlamps and climbed a glacier in driving snow. ~ Michelle Paver
What’s the worst that can happen? A tidal wave? Glaciers with guns? ~ Stephen Colbert
We in the Himalayas have the problem of glaciers melting away and we had to make our own glaciers and I don’t consider them proud or great achievement. It is only mainly to adapt to the problems that we have caused in this planet. The real solutions lie elsewhere; maybe people in the big cities of India, China and US can solve it. ~ Sonam Wangchuk
A man who keeps company with glaciers comes to feel tolerably insignificant by and by. ~ Mark Twain
If you would be thrilled by watching the galloping advance of a major glacier, you’d be ecstatic watching changes in publishing. ~ John D. MacDonald
But with the slow menace of a glacier, depression came on. No one had any measure of its progress; no one had any plan for stopping it. Everyone tried to get out of its way. ~ Frances Perkins
An ethereal mountain emerging from a tossing sea of clouds framed between two dark barracks a massive blue-black tooth of shear rock inlaid with azure glaciers, austere yet floating fairly-like on the near horizon… For hours afterwards I remained spell-bound. ~ Felice Benuzzi
Our globe is under new dramatic environmental pressure: our globe is warming, our ice caps melting, our glaciers receding, our coral is dying, our soils are eroding, our water tables falling, our fisheries are being depleted, our remaining rainforests shrinking. Something is very, very wrong with our eco-system. ~ Richard Lamm
The idiotic industry of an ant building his hill in the path of a glacier, and imagining that he is free. ~ John Clellon Holmes
East Yorkshire, to the uninitiated, just looks like a lot of little hills. But it does have these marvelous valleys that were caused by glaciers, not rivers. So it is unusual. ~ David Hockney.
Inspiring Glaciers Quotes
You might not see climate change as an immediate threat to your job, your community, or your families, Kerry said. But let me tell you, it is. He continued, climate change is directly related to the potential of greater conflict and greater instability. ~ John F. Kerry
I’ve seen some glaciers in the world which have been, which are just turquoise blue blue glaciers up in the Arctic. It’s tragic to think that because of climate change, because of man’s actions, they’re melting away. ~ Lewis Pugh
I’ve been lucky enough to meet a lot of fantastic people, from royalty to rock stars. I’ve also been known to be a bit of a daredevil, so I’ve tried to explore extreme travel and adventure- scuba-diving in an arctic glacier and camping in the Himalayas. ~ Cynthia Rowley
A glacier will frequently move forward one foot while retreating three feet… Which reminds me a lot of myself! ~ Charles M. Schulz
As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can ~ John Muir
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too. And even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, there would still be plain old death. ~ Kurt Vonnegut
Glaciers are almost gone from Glacier National Park. ~ Donella Meadows
Long, blue, spiky-edged shadows crept out across the snow-fields, while a rosy glow, at first scarce discernible, gradually deepened and suffused every mountain-top, flushing the glaciers and the harsh crags above them. ~ John Muir
The two principal parks in Alaska are Denali and Glacier Bay. Tourism is just overriding the protection of resources that tourists want to see. We have too many tourists in Denali and too many big cruise ships in Glacier Bay. ~ Michael Frome
We are trying to send our message to let the world know what is happening and what will happen to the Maldives if climate change isn’t checked. ~ Mohamed Nasheed
For we need this thing wilderness far more than it needs us. Civilizations (like glaciers) come and go, but the mountain and its forest continue the course of creation’s destiny. And in this we mere humans can take part-by fitting our civilization to the mountain. ~ Benton MacKaye
I had always been led to believe that ageing was a slow and gradual process, the creep of a glacier. Now I realise that it happens in a rush, like snow falling off a roof. ~ David Nicholls
The Alps and the glaciers together are able to take every bit of conceit out of a man and reduce his self-importance to zero if he will only remain within the influence of their sublime presence long enough to give it a fair and reasonable chance to do its work. ~ Mark Twain.
Heroism’s just doing more than you want to do or think you can. Sometimes it’s just doing the crappy things, the unhappy things other people won’t do….It’s not just jumping out of a plane onto a glacier ten thousand feet up because there’s nobody else there to do it. It’s getting out of bed in the morning when it seems like too much trouble. ~ Nora Roberts
Just to lie here in the sun with great white peaks all around me and the biggest glacier in Europe at my feet, to eat from time to time, to sleep a little and dream a great deal ~ it is a heavenly existence. ~ George Leigh Mallory
The primitive fight-or-flight regions of our mammalian brains react to immediate danger. We instinctively run from an avalanche but the gradual retreat of a glacier, the portent of the far greater danger of rising temperatures and rising oceans, just doesn’t get through to us in the same way. ~ David Olusoga
The northern border is a different problem set than our southern border. We’re not going to put a fence between America and Canada, across Glacier Park. I grew up there. We can use some technological controls. We work with the Canadians more, and there’s a lot of property we share, along with tribal lands. ~ Ryan Zinke
We’ve got pictures from the Space Station going back 20 years. We can see the glaciers receding in the photography that we do. We can see the effects of lakes drying up and other things that are happening around the planet. ~ Shannon Walker
Global warming is one of those things, not like an earthquake where there’s a big bang and you say, ‘Oh, my God, this is really, has hit us.’ It creeps up on you. … Half a degree temperature difference from one year to the next, a little bit of rise of the ocean, a little bit of melting of the glaciers, and then all of a sudden it is too late to do something about it. ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger
The mountain glaciers in every region of the world are melting, many of them at an accelerated rate, threatening drinking supplies ~ drinking water supplies and agricultural water supplies. ~ Al Gore
I used to take my car and go down to the South Island for five or six days and climb glaciers and jump out of planes and jump off bridges and go white water rafting -a bit of thrill-seeking. ~ Luke Evans
Glacier Gray is an unobtrusive gray that contrasts and enhances; bouncing off other shades without taking away from them as it slips into the background to allow other colors to take center stage. ~ Leatrice Eiseman.
Glaciers symbolize beauty of nature. I hope these quotes on glaciers will push you to love our Earth more.
