wwaterr
River words
Humans were invented by water as a means of transporting itself from one place to another.
-- Tom Robbins
Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody.
-- Mark Twain
The best [man] is like water.
Water is good; it benefits all things and does not compete with them.
It dwells in [lowly] places that all disdain.
This is why it is so near to Tao.
-- Lao-tzu (604 BC - 531 BC), The Way of Lao-tzu
You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.
-- Heraclitus (540 BC - 480 BC), On the Universe
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.
-- Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It
Upon those who step into the same rivers different and ever different waters flow down.
-- Heraclitus of Ephesus
Water generally flows downhill in this area.
-- Bob Bennett, WDIV News 4, Detroit, reporting on a flood that destroyed some suburban basement apartments.
The ocean is a body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man - who has no gills.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914), The Devil's Dictionary
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
-- W.H. Auden
Our bodies are molded rivers.
-- Novalis
The underlying attraction of the movement of water and sand is biological.
If we look more deeply we can see it as the basis of an abstract idea
linking ourselves with the limitless mechanics of the universe.
-- Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe
Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth;
without rain, there would be no life.
-- John Updike
The many-voiced song of the river echoed softly. Siddhartha looked
into the river and saw many pictures in the flowing water. The river's
voice was sorrowful. It sang with yearning and sadness, flowing towards
its goal ... Siddhartha was now listening intently...to this song of a
thousand voices ... then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of
one word: Om -- Perfection ... From that hour Siddhartha ceased to fight
against his destiny
-- Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Millions long for immortality who do not
know what to do with themselves
on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
-- Susan Ertz
Collecting all
The rains of May
The swift Mogami River.
-- Basho
The trees reflected in the river -- they are unconscious
of a spiritual world so near to them. So are we.
-- Nathaniel Hawthorne
Water sustains all.
-- Thales of Miletus, 600 B.C.
By means of water, we give life to everything.
-- Koran, 21:30
Water is the formless potential out of which creation
emerged. It is the ocean of unconsciousness enveloping the
islands of consciousness. Water bathes us at birth and again
at death, and in between it washes away sin. It is by turns the
elixir of life or the renewing rain or the devastating flood.
-- Scott Russell Sanders, Writing from the Center
I came where the river
Ran over stones;
My ears knew
An early joy.
And all the waters
Of all the streams
Sang in my veins
That summer day.
-- Theodore Roethke, The Waking, 1948
Man - despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication,
and his many accomplishments - owes his existence to
a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.
-- Author Unknown
The river moves from land to water to land, in and out
of organisms, reminding us what native peoples have
never forgotten: that you cannot separate the land
from the water, or the people from the land.
-- Lynn Noel, Voyages: Canada's Heritage Rivers
It is a fascinating and provocative thought that a body of water
deserves to be considered as an organism in its own right.
-- Lyall Watson, Supernature
I have left almost to the last the magic of water, an element which owing to
its changefulness of form and mood and colour and to the vast range of its
effects is ever the principal source of landscape beauty, and has like music
a mysterious influence over the mind.
-- Sir George Sitwell, On the Making of Gardens, 1909
I have never seen a river that I could not love. Moving water . . .
has a fascinating vitality. It has power and grace and associations.
It has a thousand colors and a thousand shapes, yet it follows laws
so definite that the tiniest streamlet is an exact replica of a great river.
-- Roderick Haig-Brown
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
is a strong brown god–sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognized as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities--ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons, and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonored, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
-- T. S. Eliot, Dry Salvages
To trace the history of a river, or a raindrop, as John Muir would have done, is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both we constantly seek and stumble on divinity, which, like the cornice feeding the lake and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself over and over again.
-- Gretel Ehrlich, Sisters of the Earth
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
-- Steven Wright
To serve the cause of water adequately... We must get to know it in
its true being. And how do we do this? Why, by treating it in the very
way exemplified by its own behavior; that is, whenever we encounter it,
we wash the tablet of our souls clean of all other impressions in order
to allow the being of water to make its imprint on us.
-- Theodor Schwenk, Water: The Element of Life
What would the world be, once bereft of wet and wildness?
Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
-- Gerard Manley Hopkins
Next to blood relationships, come water relationships.
-- Stanley Crawford, Mayordomo
When you hear the splash
Of the water drops that fall
Into the stone bowl
You will feel that all the dust
Of your mind is washed away.
-- Sen-No-Rikyu
Water flows humbly to the lowest level.
Nothing is weaker than water,
Yet for overcoming what is hard and strong,
Nothing surpasses it.
-- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
You open, land,
your mouth full of water,
your body gushes sky,
you burst, land,
your seeds explode,
the word grows green
-- Octavio Paz, Blanco, 1966
The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz: 1957 -1987.
It is water, in every form and at every scale, that saturates the mind.
All the water that will ever be is, right now.
-- National Geographic, October 1993
Life processes take place in an aqueous medium. All organisms are
composed mostly of water, whether they dwell in the oceans, lakes,
and rivers, or on the land. Because the physical and chemical properties
of water are well suited to the requirements of life, it is no accident that
life is a water-based phenomenon.
-- Robert E. Ricklefs, Ecology
Any river is really the summation of the whole valley.
To think of it as nothing but water is to ignore the greater part.
-- Hal Borland, This Hill, This Valley
Rivers are magnets for the imagination, for conscious pondering
and subconscious dreams, thrills, fears. People stare into the
moving water, captivated, as they are when gazing into a fire.
What is it that draws and holds us? The rivers' reflections of
our lives and experiences are endless . . .
-- Tim Palmer, Lifelines
We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.
-- Jacques Cousteau
The sound of the water
says what I think.
-- Chuang Tzu
We call upon the waters that rim the earth,
horizon to horizon, that flow in our rivers and streams,
that fall upon our gardens and fields,
and we ask that they teach us
and show us the way.
-- Chinook Indian Blessing
"The mark of a successful man is one that has spent an entire day on the bank of a river without feeling guilty about it."
-- Chinese philosopher
"So-this-is-a-River"
"THE River," corrected the Rat.
"And you really live by the river? What a jolly life!"
"By it and with it and on it and in it," said the Rat. "It's brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It's my world, and I don't want any other. What it hasn't got is not worth having, and what it doesn't know is not worth knowing. Lord! the times we've had together..."
-- Kenneth Grahme, The Wind in the Willows
"To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together."
-- Barry Lopez
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops -- under the rocks are the words and some of the words are theirs."
-- Norman McClean
"I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again. I was fascinated by how it sped by and yet was always there; its roar shook both the earth and me."
-- Wallace Stegner
"Rivers must have been the guides which conducted the footsteps of the first travelers. They are the constant lure, when they flow by our doors, to distant enterprise and adventure, and, by a natural impulse, the dwellers on their banks will at length accompany their currents to the lowlands of the globe, or explore at their invitation the interior of continents."
-- Henry David Thoreau
Humans were invented by water as a means of transporting itself from one place to another.
-- Tom Robbins
Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody.
-- Mark Twain
The best [man] is like water.
Water is good; it benefits all things and does not compete with them.
It dwells in [lowly] places that all disdain.
This is why it is so near to Tao.
-- Lao-tzu (604 BC - 531 BC), The Way of Lao-tzu
You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.
-- Heraclitus (540 BC - 480 BC), On the Universe
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.
-- Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It
Upon those who step into the same rivers different and ever different waters flow down.
-- Heraclitus of Ephesus
Water generally flows downhill in this area.
-- Bob Bennett, WDIV News 4, Detroit, reporting on a flood that destroyed some suburban basement apartments.
The ocean is a body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man - who has no gills.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914), The Devil's Dictionary
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
-- W.H. Auden
Our bodies are molded rivers.
-- Novalis
The underlying attraction of the movement of water and sand is biological.
If we look more deeply we can see it as the basis of an abstract idea
linking ourselves with the limitless mechanics of the universe.
-- Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe
Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth;
without rain, there would be no life.
-- John Updike
The many-voiced song of the river echoed softly. Siddhartha looked
into the river and saw many pictures in the flowing water. The river's
voice was sorrowful. It sang with yearning and sadness, flowing towards
its goal ... Siddhartha was now listening intently...to this song of a
thousand voices ... then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of
one word: Om -- Perfection ... From that hour Siddhartha ceased to fight
against his destiny
-- Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Millions long for immortality who do not
know what to do with themselves
on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
-- Susan Ertz
Collecting all
The rains of May
The swift Mogami River.
-- Basho
The trees reflected in the river -- they are unconscious
of a spiritual world so near to them. So are we.
-- Nathaniel Hawthorne
Water sustains all.
-- Thales of Miletus, 600 B.C.
By means of water, we give life to everything.
-- Koran, 21:30
Water is the formless potential out of which creation
emerged. It is the ocean of unconsciousness enveloping the
islands of consciousness. Water bathes us at birth and again
at death, and in between it washes away sin. It is by turns the
elixir of life or the renewing rain or the devastating flood.
-- Scott Russell Sanders, Writing from the Center
I came where the river
Ran over stones;
My ears knew
An early joy.
And all the waters
Of all the streams
Sang in my veins
That summer day.
-- Theodore Roethke, The Waking, 1948
Man - despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication,
and his many accomplishments - owes his existence to
a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.
-- Author Unknown
The river moves from land to water to land, in and out
of organisms, reminding us what native peoples have
never forgotten: that you cannot separate the land
from the water, or the people from the land.
-- Lynn Noel, Voyages: Canada's Heritage Rivers
It is a fascinating and provocative thought that a body of water
deserves to be considered as an organism in its own right.
-- Lyall Watson, Supernature
I have left almost to the last the magic of water, an element which owing to
its changefulness of form and mood and colour and to the vast range of its
effects is ever the principal source of landscape beauty, and has like music
a mysterious influence over the mind.
-- Sir George Sitwell, On the Making of Gardens, 1909
I have never seen a river that I could not love. Moving water . . .
has a fascinating vitality. It has power and grace and associations.
It has a thousand colors and a thousand shapes, yet it follows laws
so definite that the tiniest streamlet is an exact replica of a great river.
-- Roderick Haig-Brown
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
is a strong brown god–sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognized as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities--ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons, and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonored, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
-- T. S. Eliot, Dry Salvages
To trace the history of a river, or a raindrop, as John Muir would have done, is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both we constantly seek and stumble on divinity, which, like the cornice feeding the lake and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself over and over again.
-- Gretel Ehrlich, Sisters of the Earth
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
-- Steven Wright
To serve the cause of water adequately... We must get to know it in
its true being. And how do we do this? Why, by treating it in the very
way exemplified by its own behavior; that is, whenever we encounter it,
we wash the tablet of our souls clean of all other impressions in order
to allow the being of water to make its imprint on us.
-- Theodor Schwenk, Water: The Element of Life
What would the world be, once bereft of wet and wildness?
Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
-- Gerard Manley Hopkins
Next to blood relationships, come water relationships.
-- Stanley Crawford, Mayordomo
When you hear the splash
Of the water drops that fall
Into the stone bowl
You will feel that all the dust
Of your mind is washed away.
-- Sen-No-Rikyu
Water flows humbly to the lowest level.
Nothing is weaker than water,
Yet for overcoming what is hard and strong,
Nothing surpasses it.
-- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
You open, land,
your mouth full of water,
your body gushes sky,
you burst, land,
your seeds explode,
the word grows green
-- Octavio Paz, Blanco, 1966
The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz: 1957 -1987.
It is water, in every form and at every scale, that saturates the mind.
All the water that will ever be is, right now.
-- National Geographic, October 1993
Life processes take place in an aqueous medium. All organisms are
composed mostly of water, whether they dwell in the oceans, lakes,
and rivers, or on the land. Because the physical and chemical properties
of water are well suited to the requirements of life, it is no accident that
life is a water-based phenomenon.
-- Robert E. Ricklefs, Ecology
Any river is really the summation of the whole valley.
To think of it as nothing but water is to ignore the greater part.
-- Hal Borland, This Hill, This Valley
Rivers are magnets for the imagination, for conscious pondering
and subconscious dreams, thrills, fears. People stare into the
moving water, captivated, as they are when gazing into a fire.
What is it that draws and holds us? The rivers' reflections of
our lives and experiences are endless . . .
-- Tim Palmer, Lifelines
We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.
-- Jacques Cousteau
The sound of the water
says what I think.
-- Chuang Tzu
We call upon the waters that rim the earth,
horizon to horizon, that flow in our rivers and streams,
that fall upon our gardens and fields,
and we ask that they teach us
and show us the way.
-- Chinook Indian Blessing
"The mark of a successful man is one that has spent an entire day on the bank of a river without feeling guilty about it."
-- Chinese philosopher
"So-this-is-a-River"
"THE River," corrected the Rat.
"And you really live by the river? What a jolly life!"
"By it and with it and on it and in it," said the Rat. "It's brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It's my world, and I don't want any other. What it hasn't got is not worth having, and what it doesn't know is not worth knowing. Lord! the times we've had together..."
-- Kenneth Grahme, The Wind in the Willows
"To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together."
-- Barry Lopez
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops -- under the rocks are the words and some of the words are theirs."
-- Norman McClean
"I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again. I was fascinated by how it sped by and yet was always there; its roar shook both the earth and me."
-- Wallace Stegner
"Rivers must have been the guides which conducted the footsteps of the first travelers. They are the constant lure, when they flow by our doors, to distant enterprise and adventure, and, by a natural impulse, the dwellers on their banks will at length accompany their currents to the lowlands of the globe, or explore at their invitation the interior of continents."
-- Henry David Thoreau
