50 Stone Quotes Honoring Earth’s Minerals

By Clifton Sankofa | Published September 17, 2023

Learn why humanity has been fascinated with rocks for centuries with our stone quotes.

Stones have captivated humans from all societies since the beginning of time.

We use stones in many aspects of our lives; they impact everything from culture, religion, spirituality, war, construction, and jewelry.

Check out our stone quotes to learn more.

What is a stone?

A stone is a hard piece of rock or mass of compacted mineral.

Natural stones include granite, marble, or sandstone.

Manufactured products like bricks or concrete or not stone.

Why is a stone fourteen pounds?

You may have noticed that folks from England tend to use the word stone as a unit of measurement.

Humans are clever beings, and we have been using our environment to help us sort things out for years.

Long ago, any good-sized rock was chosen as a local measurement standard.

In England, the stone became the widely used weight in trade.

However, the weight would fluctuate depending on the region’s commodities.

In the year 1389, a royal statue set the stone weights for various products:

The stone of wool was set at 14 lbs, a sack of wool was set at 26 stones, and the stone of glass was 5 lbs.

These measurements would grow in popularity and eventually be used to designate the weights of people and large animals.

What is a rolling stone?

Rolling Stone is the name of a popular music magazine; however, the phrase rolling stone is an American slang term.

In American slang, a rolling stone is a person who roams from place to place and never settles down in one home.

It comes from the phrase, “A rolling stone gathers no moss.”

Over time, moss gathers on rocks that sit still.

In this sense, moss is an analogy for attachments like family or loved ones.

This phrase can also apply to womanizers or people who refuse to take care of familial responsibilities.

Check out our stone quotes to learn more.

Short stone quotes for staying centered

Let’s start with these quick quotes about all that stones have to teach us.

1. “Leave no stone unturned.” — Euripides

2. “The past is a stepping stone, not a millstone.” — Robert Plant

3. “The stone often recoils on the head of the thrower.” — Elizabeth I

4. “If you can take the hot lead enema, then you can cast the first stone.” — Lenny Bruce

5. “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to cast a stone.” — Jesus Christ

6. “Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice?” — William Butler Yeats

7. “A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, a mere heart of stone.” — Charles Darwin

8. “Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” — Michelangelo

9. “The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.” — Sigmund Freud

10. “If you know how to spend less than you get, you have the philosopher’s stone.” — Benjamin Franklin

The best stone quotes for rock lovers

These quotes remind us how stones can weigh us down or protect us.

11. “Bollywood is not a stepping stone to the West.” — Priyanka Chopra

12. “A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man.” — William Hazlitt

13. “A fool can throw a stone in a pond that 100 wise men can not get out.” — Saul Bellow

14. “I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick; I’m so mean I make medicine sick.” — Muhammad Ali

15. “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

16. “The solitude of the Mexican, under the great stone night of the high plateau that is still inhabited by insatiable gods.” — Octavio Paz

17. “I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention: To not be like your parents, to not be like your friends, to be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone.” — Henry Rollins

18. “The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight.” — Albert Camus

19. “I’ll say that I don’t think you can throw a stone and not come in contact with someone who knows someone or has problems with substance abuse.” — Octavia Spencer

20. “Because of my song ‘Sam Stone,’ a lot of people thought I was interested in writing protest songs. Writing protest songs always struck me as patting yourself on the back.” — John Prine

Famous stone quotes about rolling stones

Rolling stones keep on moving.

21. “Papa was a rolling stone.” — David Ruffin

22. “Calmly, I roll the stone up the hill.” — Killah Priest

23. “A rolling stone gathers no moss, but it gains a certain polish.” — Oliver Herford

24. “Shortly after college, I was working in New York City at Rolling Stone magazine.” — Lisa Lampanelli

25. “Just because I look sexy on the cover of Rolling Stone doesn’t mean I’m naughty.” — Britney Spears

26. “My dad was never married. He was kind of a rolling stone. But he was never disrespectful.” — Kevin Hart

27. “Bob Dylan did the first really long record, Like A Rolling Stone; I think it was four minutes.” — Pete Townshend

28. “Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.” — Jorge Luis Borges

29. “Become dust, and they will throw thee in the air; Become stone, and they will throw thee on glass.” — Muhammad Iqbal

30. “Travel and society polish one, but a rolling stone gathers no moss, and a little moss is a good thing on a man.” — John Burroughs

Stone Aged quotes and sayings about early Earth history

Keeping up with the theme of all things stone, check out these awesome quotes about the Stone Age.

31. “We should bomb Vietnam back into the Stone Age.” — Curtis LeMay

32. “I’m not a prophet or a Stone-Aged man, just a mortal with potential of a Superman. I’m living on.” — David Bowie

33. “The Stone Age marks a period of prehistory in which humans used primitive stone tools.” — History Channel

34. “An instant’s thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed out of the Stone Age.” — Christopher Hitchens

35. “Stone Age. Bronze Age. Iron Age. We define entire epics of humanity by the technology they use.” — Reed Hastings

36. “They’ve got to drawn in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them into the Stone Age.” — Curtis LeMay

37. “Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age was quite a favorite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work.” — Christopher Hitchens

38. “During the Stone Age, humans shared the planet with a number of now-extinct hominin relatives, including Neanderthals and Denisovans.” — History Channel

39. “Before there were any sort of ‘recordings,’ there was performance. If we are devolved back to the Stone Age tomorrow, there will be performance.” — Todd Rundgren

40. “The Stone Age began about 2.6 million years ago when researchers found the earliest evidence of humans using stone tools and lasted until about 3,300 B.C.” — History Channel

The top poetic stone quotes for expressive people

We close our list with these beautiful quotes about stones.

41. “I wept not, so to stone within I grew.” — Dante Alighieri

42. “Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set.” — Francis Bacon

43. “Anger is as a stone cast into a wasp’s nest.” — Pope Paul VI

44. “But if you start by editing your imagination, you start with a tiny stone.” — Brian Chesky

45. “But I cannot conceive man without thought; he would be a stone or a brute.” — Blaise Pascal

46. “Think of the imagination as a giant stone from which we carve out new ideas.” — Brian Chesky

47. “Let him that is without stone among you cast the first thing he can lay his hands on.” — Robert Frost

48. “It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.” — Erica Jong

49. “I wanted to know the name of every stone and flower and insect and bird and beast.” — George Washington Carver

50. “People live as if the opposite were true and treat the present moment as a stepping stone to the next moment, a means to an end.” — Eckhart Tolle