36 Ice Quotes That Remind Us To Protect Our Environments Diversity
Ice is simply water in its frozen or solid form. We experience ice in many ways, from the essential cube in our cold drinks to the winter season when snow falls. Ice can contrast with striking beauty and shine while also pointing to danger and chills. We’ve compiled some of the best ice quotes reflecting its glimmer and natural state.
Here, you’ll find ice quotes talking about its unique place in nature and the feeling that comes with the winter season. You’ll also find inspiration about protecting bodies of ice on earth and how their decline point to the impacts of climate change.
Best ice quotes
Just as many things exist as opposites, ice opposes fire or heat. With ice, we get a cold feeling and a unique translucent visual, from the unique shapes that ice forms to melting metaphors.
On the one hand, we can create ice within our homes when we freeze water for various purposes, such as cooling our drinks or taking care of swollen injuries.
Outside of our homes, our world has large bodies of ice in the form of glaciers through the thin crusts on puddles on a cold winter's day.
Glaciers are an accumulation of crystalline ice, snow, sediment, liquid water, and rock. One of the unique qualities of ice is the presence of ice burns. Like how fire or heat burns, having something cold on your skin for an extended period can increase the chances of a burn.
Below, we’ve compiled some of our favorite ice quotes that touch on various aspects of the cold and ice.
Related: You might also like our compilations of the best environment quotes, and for more ice, our winter quotes talk about the beauty of the season.
"Like fragile ice anger passes away in time."
- Ovid
"Climate change is not just about carbon dioxide levels and melting polar ice caps. It is about our public health and protecting our Earth for future generations."
- Mike Quigley
"Have a dream, chase it down, jump over every single hurdle, and run through fire and ice to get there."
- Whitney Wolfe Herd
"Winter forms our character and brings out our best."
- Tom Allen
"Take ice. Ice is fascinating to me. Ice is the one thing in our world that went from an agricultural product to being manufactured."
- Alton Brown
Ice sayings and quotes about its natural beauty
Although the winter season or cold may not be everyone’s favorite period, we can still take note of the charm of the cold weather. From skating over ice to winter vistas, frozen droplets make their way from the sky to building rooftops and the ground.
Whether you enjoy skating in the winter or simply love the feeling of watching a frozen pond, you’ll appreciate the ice sayings here. Our compilation of ice quotes reflects on the ice and its charm in this section. These quotes serve as reminders that we can love all seasons - fall, spring, summer, and winter - in all their glory.
"Our solar system is actually a wild frontier, teeming with different, diverse places: planets and moons, millions of objects of ice and rock."
- Carrie Nugent
"People travel and hunt on the sea ice - in Alaska, they hunt in skin boats for bowhead whales; in Greenland, they hunt with dogsleds. The ice is their highway. The ice is also the ecosystem in which marine mammals and terrestrial animals such as polar bears exist."
- Gretel Ehrlich
"There's just something beautiful about walking on snow that nobody else has walked on."
- Carol Rifka Brunt.
"It is the life of the crystal, the architect of the flake, the fire of the frost, the soul of the sunbeam. This crisp winter air is full of it."
- John Burroughs
Ice quotes about life and living
This section explores some ice quotes that remind us of important aspects of living. Whereas ice might appear as just frozen water on the surface, there are layers to its presence that we can reflect on as we navigate everyday life.
Many people take icy winter weather as a cue to embrace warmth, togetherness, and family. When the winter’s chill comes, and we stay indoors, the cold and snow remind us to cherish small moments. In this light, ice is not dangerous.
Ice also reminds us that not every uncomfortable situation lasts forever. For people who would rather have the heat from summer, cold days don’t have to be miserable. Just as the ice has come and gone before, it will again. Below, you’ll find some comforting words that explore ice quotes about living.
"Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness."
- Werner Herzog
"Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate."
- Albert Schweitzer
"There's nothing pretty about ice. Ice grows nothing. But we've got this in our minds that we've got to make everything cold."
- Don Young
"Mirrors are ice which do not melt: what melts are those who admire themselves in them."
- Paul Morand
"We all get the same amount of ice. The rich get it in the summer. The poor get it in the winter."
- Bat Masterson
"When you're on the ice, you have very little time, you see very little, and everything happens really quick."
- Steve Yzerman
"I seemed to vow to myself that some day I would go to the region of ice and snow and go on and on till I came to one of the poles of the earth, the end of the axis upon which this great round ball turns."
- Ernest Shackleton
"Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is time for home."
- Edith Sitwell.
"Ice has a social life. Its changeability shapes the culture, language and stories of those who live near it."
- Robert Macfarlane
"Meteorite hunting is not for wimps. The best places to look are also the coldest and windiest. You need very old ice, and you need wind, lots of it, strong and unrelenting. Antarctica fits the bill."
- Mary Roach
Related read: Coldest places in the world.
"It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia."
- Frank Zappa
"Everything's borne out of human experience, of course - rejection, humiliation, poverty, whatever. People aren't born bad, no matter how harsh the circumstances. There is a person in there, and that person is not made of ice."
- Aidan Gillen
Quotes about thin ice and that icy feeling
No matter how you view thin ice, it often denotes a dangerous or risky situation. Literally skating on thin ice requires safety precautions to avoid injuries. Also, the metaphor of skating on thin ice means doing something scary or with potentially unpleasant results should the thin ice give way.
Whether literally or metaphorically, you’ve most likely been in a similar situation. When on thin ice, it raises feelings of anxiousness and caution. Here are some quotes that capture this icy feeling.
"Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost."
- A.S. Byatt
"In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The thinner the ice, the more anxious everyone is to see whether it will bear."
- Josh Billings
"It's a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water. "
- Franklin P. Jones
Ice quotes from the arts and literature
Many creative minds have referenced ice in their writing from line to line and poem to poem. Here, we capture some ice quotes from the arts and literature to fuel your creative mind.
"The human life is all one thing, like a blade tracing loops on the ice: a little kid, a twenty-three-year-old infantry sergeant, a middle-aged writer knowing guilt and sorrow."
- Tim O'Brien
"Fire and Ice Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice."
- Robert Frost
"Blow, blow, thou winter wind, thou art not so unkind as man's ingratitude."
- William Shakespeare
"Thou art all ice. Thy kindness freezes."
- William Shakespeare
"Hear! hear! screamed the jay from a neighboring tree, where I had heard a tittering for some time, 'winter has a concentrated and nutty kernel, if you know where to look for it.'"
- Henry David Thoreau
Ice quotes about protecting our planet
"As a species, we've somehow survived large and small ice ages, genetic bottlenecks, plagues, world wars and all manner of natural disasters, but I sometimes wonder if we'll survive our own ingenuity."
- Diane Ackerman
"What most people know but don't realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already. If the sun wasn't there, we'd be a frozen ice ball at three degrees Kelvin, and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation. The whole ecosystem is solar-powered."
- Elon Musk
"For humans, the Arctic is a harshly inhospitable place, but the conditions there are precisely what polar bears require to survive - and thrive. 'Harsh' to us is 'home' for them. Take away the ice and snow, increase the temperature by even a little, and the realm that makes their lives possible literally melts away."
- Sylvia Earle
"As a scientist, my attention became totally focused on global warming some 15 years ago by the elegant and powerful measurements of carbon dioxide trapped in ice cores taken as much as 2 miles deep from the great East Antarctica ice sheet."
- John Olver
"Often extinctions in the ocean occur at the same time as those on land. Then again, the ice age extinctions lost many big animals, but not many sea faring ones."
- Robert T. Bakker
"The climate has always changed - after all, we've had numerous ice ages without human influence - but human activity has undoubtedly exacerbated Earth's natural trends beyond its capacity to adjust."
- Christine Todd Whitman
Jen’s a passionate environmentalist and sustainability expert. With a science degree from Babcock University Jen loves applying her research skills to craft editorial that connects with our global changemaker and readership audiences centered around topics including zero waste, sustainability, climate change, and biodiversity.
Elsewhere Jen’s interests include the role that future technology and data have in helping us solve some of the planet’s biggest challenges.
