John Wesley Powell

You cannot see the Grand Canyon in one view, as if it were a changeless spectacle from which a curtain might be lifted, but to see it you have to toil from month to month through its labyrinths.

The wonders of the Grand Canyon cannot be adequately represented in symbols of speech, nor by speech itself. The resources of the graphic art are taxed beyond their powers in attempting to portray its features. Language and illustration …

We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not. Ah, well! we may conjecture many things. The …

On the walls, and back many miles into the country, numbers of monument-shaped buttes are observed. So we have a curious ensemble of wonderful features—carved walls, royal arches, glens, alcove gulches, mounds, and monuments. From which of …

The landscape everywhere, away from the river, is of rock—cliffs of rock, tables of rock, plateaus of rock, terraces of rock, crags of rock—ten thousand strangely carved forms; rocks everywhere, and no vegetation, no soil, no sand. In …

The mountain slopes...are covered with dense forests of pines and firs. The lakes are often fringed with beautiful aspens, and when the autumn winds come their golden leaves are carried over the landscape in clouds of resplendent sheen.

Realizing the difficulty of painting in word colors a land so strange, so wonderful, and so vast in its features, in the weakness of my descriptive powers I have sought refuge in graphic illustration.

The exploration was not made for adventure, but purely for scientific purposes, geographic and geologic, and I had no intention of writing an account of it, but only of recording the scientific results.

In my supposed death I had attained to a glory which I fear my continued life has not fully vindicated.

The history of the world is replete with illustrations to the effect that the greater the ignorance the greater the abomination of unconforming opinion, and the greater the knowledge the greater the charity for dissenting opinions.

In the past, history has been devoted chiefly to the exploits of heroes and the story of wars; but history is now being speedily reorganized and rewritten upon a scientific basis, to exhibit the growth of culture in all its grand …

Honest investigation is but the application of common sense to the solution of the unknown. Science does not wait on Genius, but is the companion of Industry.

Economy in speech is the force by which its development has been accomplished, and it divides itself properly into economy of utterance and economy of thought. Economy of utterance has had to do with the phonic constitution of words; …

In Ute the name for bear is "he seizes," or "the hugger." In this case the verb is used for the noun, and in so doing the Indian names the bear by predicating one of his characteristics. Thus noun and verb are undifferentiated.

In Seneca the north is "the sun never goes there," and this sentence may be used as adjective or noun; in such cases noun, adjective, verb, and adverb are found as one vocable or word, and the four parts of speech are undifferentiated.

Indian nouns are extremely connotive; that is, the name does more than simply denote the thing to which it belongs; in denoting the object, it also assigns to it some quality or characteristic.

The integers of language are sentences, and their organs are the parts of speech. Linguistic organization, then, consists in the differentiation of the parts of speech and the integration of the sentence.

Possible ideas and thoughts are vast in number. A distinct word for every distinct idea and thought would require a vast vocabulary. The problem in language is to express many ideas and thoughts with comparatively few words.

The verb is relatively of much greater importance in an Indian tongue than in a civilized language.

Years of drought and famine come and years of flood and famine come, and the climate is not changed with dance, libation or prayer.