Waternature.com: Excerpts and Quotes

Excerpts and Quotes

"The Upholder of the Cycles which supports the whole of life, is WATER. In every drop of water dwells a Deity, whom we all serve; there also dwells Life, the Soul of the 'First' Substance - Water - whose boundaries and banks are the capillaries that guide it and in which it circulates."
-Viktor Schauberger

You sources of all life,
upon whom hang Heaven and Earth,
you spring forth, you over flow!
Goethe (from Faust)

Pure Water is the Best Drink for a Wise Man

Henry Thoreau

"Towards the end of this millennium, a liter of water will cost more than a liter of wine"Viktor Schauberger, 1935

The highest good is like water. Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive. It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao. In dwelling, be close to the land. In meditation, go deep in the heart. In dealing with others, be gentle and kind. In speech, be true. In ruling, be just. In business, be competent. In action, watch the timing. No fight : No blame.

Lao Tsu

Everything has its beginning in the water - Lame Deer

Albert Einstein:
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious - the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.

Albert Einstein:
All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein:
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

Albert Einstein:
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

Carl Jung:
Science is the tool of the Western mind and with it more doors can be opened than with bare hands. It is part and parcel of our knowledge and obscures our insight only when it holds that the understanding given by it is the only kind there is.

George Bernard Shaw:
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

Isaac Asimov:
When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

The good rain, like the bad preacher, does not know when to leave off.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

In every glass of water we drink, some of the water has already
passed through fishes, trees, bacteria, worms in the soil, and
many other organisms, including people... Living systems
cleanse water and make it fit, among other things,
for human consumption.
- Elliot A. Norse, Animal Extinctions

Children of a culture born in a water-rich environment,
we have never really learned how important water is
to us. We understand it, but we do not respect it.
William Ashworth, Nor Any Drop to Drink, 1982

Don't empty the water jar until the rain falls.
- Philippine proverb

When time comes for us to again rejoin the infinite stream of water
flowing to and from the great timeless ocean, our little droplet of
soulful water will once again flow with the endless stream.
- William E. Marks, The Holy Order Of Water

To a gardener there is nothing more exasperating
than a hose that just isn't long enough.
- Cecil Roberts

If there is magic on the planet, it is contained in the water.
- Loren Eisley

How beautiful is the rain!
After the dust and the heat,
In the broad and fiery street,
In the narrow lane,
How beautiful is the rain!
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Rain in Summer

Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth;
without rain, there would be no life.
- John Updike

Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale,
and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most
absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his
legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there
be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert,
try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical
professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded forever.
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick

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

Water is the driver of Nature.
- Leonardo da Vinci

We knew it would rain, for the poplars showed
The white of their leaves, the amber grain
Shrunk in the wind,--and the lightning now
Is tangled in tremulous skeins of rain.
- Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Before the Rain

Millions long for immortality who do not
know what to do with themselves
on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
- Susan Ertz

We can't help being thirsty, moving toward the voice of water.
Milk drinkers draw close to the mother.
Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists,
Hindus, shamans, everyone hears the intelligent sound
and moves with thirst to meet it.
- Jeladuddin Rumi (1207-1273)

Truths are first clouds; then rain, then harvest and food.
- Henry Ward Beecher

In the Western United States,
water flows uphill to money.
- Glen Sanders

You could not step twice into the same rivers;
for other waters are ever flowing on to you.
- Heraclitus of Ephesus

A little rain each day will fill the rivers to overflowing.
- Proverb from Liberia

If you gave me several million years, there would be nothing
that did not grow in beauty if it were surrounded by water.
- Jan Erik Vold, What All The World Knows

"When you look at that nature world it becomes an icon, it becomes
a holy picture that speaks of the origins of the world. Almost every
mythology tjat lmpws amutjomg abpit water sees the origins of
life coming out of water. And, curiously, that's true. It's amusing
that the origin of life out of water is in myths and then again,
finally, in science, we find the same thing. It's exactly so."
- Joseph Campbell, The Hero's Journey, p. 10

The frog does not drink up the pond in which he lives.
- American Indian Saying

The trees reflected in the river -- they are unconscious
of a spiritual world so near to them. So are we.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne

My sorrow, when she's here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain
are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree;
she walks the sodden pasture lane.
- Robert Frost

Advice to those about to build a Water-garden - DON'T. Not that the Water-garden
is not a joy and a glory; but that it is cruelly hard to keep in order and control unless
you are a master of millions and of broad ample acres of pool and pond. Water,
like fire, is a good servant, perhaps, but is painfully liable to develop into a master.
- R. J. Farrer, Alpines and Bog Plants, 1908

Filthy water cannot be washed.
- African proverb

How often it is that a garden, beautiful though it be, will seem
sad and dreary and lacking in one of its most gracious
features, if it has no water.
- Pierre Husson

Some think that even the ancients who lived long before the present generation,
and first framed accounts of the Gods, had a similar view of nature; for they
made the Oceanus and Tethys the parents of creation, and described the oath
of the Gods as being by water, to which they give the name of Styx; for what
is oldest is most honourable, and the most honourable thing is that by
which one swears
Mary Austin, Land of Little Rain

Innumerable as the stars of night,
Or stars of morning, dewdrops which the sun
Impearls on every leaf and every flower.
- John Milton

Let the rain kiss you.
Let the rain beat upon your headwith silver liquid drops.
Let the rain sing you a lullaby.
- Langston Hughes, April Rain Song, 1902 - 1967

Everywhere water is a thing of beauty gleaming in the dewdrop,
singing in the summer rain.
- John Ballantine Gough

Don't throw away the old bucket until you know whether the new one holds water.
- Swedish proverb

I am sure it is a great mistake always to know enough to go in when it rains.
One may keep snug and dry by such knowledge,
but one misses a world of loveliness.
- Adeline Knapp

Like swift water, an active mind never stagnates.

Water sustains all.
- Thales of Miletus, 600 B.C.

If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall.
If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do.
The same happens in the absense of prayers.
- Steve Allen

If you saw what the river carried, you would never drink the water.
- Jamaican proverb

Keeping in touch with childhood memories keeps us believing
in life’s simplest pleasures like a rainy afternoon,
a swingset, and a giant puddle to play in.
- Chrissy Ogden

When the well is dry, we know the worth of water.
- Benjamin Franklin

Every peasant is proud of the pond in his village because from it he measures the sea.
- Russian proverb

Even if you sit at the bottom of the stream, you cannot be a fish.

If there is a continual going to the well, one day there will be a smashing of the pitcher.

The stone in the water knows nothing of the hill which lies parched in the sun.

African Proverbs

Till taught by pain,
Men really know not what good water's worth;
If you had been in Turkey or in Spain,
Or with a famish'd boat's-crew had your berth,
Or in the desert heard the camel's bell,
You'd wish yourself where Truth is--in a well.
- Lord Byron, Don Juan

Human beings are made up mostly of water, in roughly the same percentage
as water is to the surface of the earth. Our tissues and membranes, our brains
and hearts, our sweat and tears--all reflect the same recipe for life, in which
efficient use is made of those ingredients available on the surface of the earth.
We are 23 percent carbon, 2.6 percent nitrogen, 1.4 percent calcium, 1.1 percent
phosphorous, with tiny amounts of roughly three dozen other elements. But above
all we are oxygen (61 percent) and hydrogen (10 percent), fused together in the
unique molecular combination known as water, which makes up 71 percent
of the human body.
- Al Gore, Earth in the Balance

Passions are likened best to floods and streams:
The shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb.
- Sir Walter Raleigh, 1552 - 1618

From the heart of this fountain of delights wells up some bitter taste
to choke them even amid the flowers.
- Lucretius, 99 - 55 B.C.

Water is a good servant, but it is a cruel master.
- John Bullein, 1562

A river seems a magic thing. A magic, moving, living part of the very
earth itself - for it is from the soil, both from its depth and from its
surface, that a river has its beginning.
- Laura Gilpin

'Tis a little thing
To give a cup of water; yet its draught
Of cool refreshment, drain'd by fever'd lips,
May give a shock of pleasure to the frame
More exquisite than when nectarean juice
Renews the life of joy in happiest hours.
- Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, Ion

I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under;
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Cloud, 1792 - 1822

The Clouds consign their treasures to the fields;
And, softly shaking on the dimpled pool
Prelusive drops, let all their moisture flow
In large effusion, o'er the freshen'd world.
- James Thomson, Seasons--Spring

By means of water, we give life to everything.
- Koran, 21:30

The bare earth, plantless, waterless, is an immense puzzle. In the forests
or beside rivers everything speaks to humans. The desert does not speak.
I could not comprehend its tongue; its silence....
- Pablo Neruda

For fountains, they are a Great Beauty and Refreshment,
but Pools mar all, and make the Garden unwholesome,
and full of Flies and Frogs."
- Sir Francis Bacon, Of Gardens, 1625

Be praised, My Lord, through Sister Water;
she is very useful, and humble, and precious, and pure.
- Francis of Assisi, Canticle of the Sun

Love is like dew that falls on both nettles and lilies.
Swedish Proverb

God made rainy days, so gardeners could get the housework done.
- Author Unknown

Soften my heart,
O God of living waters,
that the shower of Scripture
I am about to read
may enrich the soil of my soul.

Rain down your wisdom
in sacred streams
to carry me like an upturned leaf
through the currents of this gray day.
Amen.

- Edward Hays, Prayers for a Planetary Pilgrim

Before enlightenment - chop wood and carry water.
After enlightenment - chop wood and carry water.
- Zen saying

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

The great and amorous sky curved over the earth, and lay upon her as a pure lover.
The rain, the humid flux descending from heaven for both man and animal, for both
thick and strong, germinated the wheat, swelled the furrows with fecund mud and
brought forth the buds in the orchards. And it is I who empowered these moist espousals,
I the great Aphrodite ....
- Aeschylus, The Danaides, c 500 B.C.

Then Heaven, the Father Almighty, comes down in fruitful showers
into the lap of his joyous spouse, and his might, with her mighty frame
commingling, nurtures all growths.
- Virgil, Georgics

In Scandinavian mythology, for example, the fountain of Mimir,
source of hidden wisdom, lay under the roots of the great world
tree and in Islamic culture fountains are found referred to in the
Koran, in the garden called Paradise. In the Bible the passage:
"It is done, I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end.
I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water
of life freely," reflects the importance that fountains
symbolized to the writers.
- Bryan R. Hirst, Fountains

All feelings, both positive and unpleasant, come out of the same faucet.
To turn down the faucet on pain is to slow the flow of pleasant feelings as well.
- Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks

No one can see their reflection in running water.
It is only in still water that we can see.
- Taoist proverb

From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of an
Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the
other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known
whenever we are shown a link of it.
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

Of the first philosophers, then, most thought the principles which were of the nature
of matter were the only principles of all things. That of which all things that are consist,
the first from which they come to be, the last into which they are resolved….this they
say is the element and this is the principle of things…. yet they do not all agree as
to the number and the nature of these principle is water….
- Mary Austin, Land of Little Rain

The rain is plentious but, by God's decree,
Only a third is meant for you and me;
Two-thirds are taken by the growing things
Or vanish Heavenward on vapour's wings:
Nor does it mathematically fall
With social equity on one and all.
The population's habit is to grow
In every region where the water's low:
Nature is blamed for failings that are Man's,
And well-run rivers have to change their plans.

- Sir Alan Herbert, Water

But when I came, alas, to wive,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
By swaggering could I never thrive,
For the rain it raineth every day.
- William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

It ain't no use to grumble and complain;
It's jest as cheap and easy to rejoice;
When God sorts out the weather and sends rain,
Why, rain's my choice.
- James Whitcomb Riley, Rain, 1849 - 1916

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

We have been quick to assume rights to use water but slow to
recognize obligations to preserve and protect it... In short, we
need a water ethic--a guide to right conduct in the face of
complex decisions about natural systems we do not
and cannot fully understand.
- Sandra Postel, Last Oasis: Facing Water Scarcity

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

According to Democritus, truth lies at the bottom of a well, the water
of which serves as a mirror in which objects may be reflected. I have
heard, however, that some philosophers, in seeking for truth, to pay
homage to her, have seen their own image and adored it instead.
- Charles Richter

Constant dripping hollows out a stone.
- Lucretius

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

A little rain will fill
The lily's cup which hardly moistens the field.
- Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia

When you drink the water, remember the spring.
- Chinese proverb

To enjoy freedom ... we have of course to control ourselves.
We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly,
squirting half the house in order to water a single rose.
- Virginia Woolf, The Second Common Reader

Freedom alone is not enough without light to read at night,
without time or access to water to irrigate your farm,
without the ability to catch fish to feed your family.
- Nelson Mandela

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

I'm singing in the rain, just singing in the rain;
What a wonderful feeling, I'm happy again.
- Arthur Freed

Pity! The southerly trees have shed their leaves.
Nobody comes to appreciate the mountain's beauty.
Tomorrow I too will float away.
My reflection gone from cool streams.
- Cheng Man-ch'ing, 1933

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

Have you watched the fairies when the rain is done,
Spreading out their little wings to dry them in the sun?
- Rose Fyleman

In the spring rain,
The pond and the river
Have become one.
- Buson

Flowing water never goes bad;
our doorways never gather termites.
- Chinese Proverbs

Expect poison from the standing water.
- William Blake

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

How it pours, pours, pours,
In a never-ending sheet!
How it drives beneath the doors!
How it soaks the passer's feet!
How it rattles on the shutter!
How it rumples up the lawn!
How 'twill sigh, and moan, and mutter,
From darkness until dawn.
- Rossiter Johnson, Rhyme of the Rain

Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated
by fusion power is ancient. It's called 'rain'.
- Michael McClary

The Mississippi River carries the mud of thirty states and two
provinces 2,000 miles south to the delta and deposits 500
million tons of it there every year. The business of the
Mississippi, which it will accomplish in time, is methodically
to transport all of Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico.
- Charles Kuralt

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

When oxygen and hydrogen find one another, their joining produces fiery passion.
Out of this fire, water is born. Quaint Victorian chemistry gives us an image of one
oxygen and two hydrogen atoms in a fixed molecule that bounces around from
place to place. The reality of water is not so orderly. The hydrogen atoms are not
owned by any particular oxygen atom. Water is a substance very much in love
with itself, and the atoms connect in webs and clusters where oxygen shares
around the hydrogen atoms freely, a fluid situation indeed.
- Ian D. Anderson, Ian Lurking Bear

Water is the basis of life and the blue arteries of the earth!
Everything in the non-marine environment depends on freshwater to survive.
- -Sandra Postel

It is the sea that whitens the roof.
The sea drifts through the winter air.

It is the sea that the north wind makes.
The sea is in the falling snow.
- Wallace Stevens, The Man With the Blue Guitar

The world turns softly
Not to spill its lakes and rivers,
The water is held in its arms
And the sky is held in the water.
What is water,
That pours silver,
And can hold the sky?
- Hilda Conkling, Water

Man is not an aquatic animal, but from the time we stand in
youthful wonder beside a Spring brook till we sit in old age
and watch the endless roll of the sea, we feel a strong kinship
with the waters of this world.
- Hal Borland, Sundial of the Seasons

Fountains indicate and signal well-being to all. Not only that, they
share their Karmic energy with all who see, hear, smell, taste and
touch them. They are, and always have been, necessary for
permanent settlements. We use them when ever we turn on a tap.
Fountains have come to symbolize the generosity of a god, an
institution or a person. They indicate abundance and ingenuity.
In every culture they play a part in the mythology of life.
- Bryan R. Hirst, Fountains

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

In the time that I have been acquainted with this region I have become increasingly
aware of it as a testament of water, the origin and guide of its contours and gradients
and of all the lives - the plants and small creatures, and the culture - that evolved here.
That was always here to be seen, of course, and the recognition has forced itself,
in one form or other, upon people in every part of the world who have been directly
involved with the growing of living things. The gardener who ignores it is soon
left with no garden.
- W. S. Merwin, A Shape of Water, 1997

Next to blood relationships, come water relationships.
- Stanley Crawford, Mayordomo

For after all the best thing one can do when
it is raining, is to let it rain.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Rain does not fall on one roof alone.
- Proverb from Cameroon

Always leave extra time for unraveling the hose.
The Thirst is so great that many visualize Heaven as being in the Midst of Clouds.
The fountains, pools and streams in Shangri-La are ever full and never polluted.
Remember that the River of Forgetfulness flows by the Elysian Fields.
Drip, drip, drip ... your way to garden stewardship.
The end of the garden is at the end of the hose.
Gardens dream about water.
Water the soil not the plants.
Every gallon must work!
- Michael P. Garofalo, Pulling Onions: The Quips and Maxims of a Gardener

Water is the mother of the vine,
The nurse and fountain of fecundity,
The adorner and refresher of the world.
- Charles Mackay, The Dionysia

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity
and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity
will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy;
neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
- John W. Gardner

To the waters, and the wild, with a Faerie, hand in hand,
for the world is more
full of weeping ... than you can understand.
- W.B. Yeats

A life all turbulence and noise may seem
To him that leads it wise and to be praised,
But wisdom is a pearl with most success
Sought in still waters.
- William Cowper, The Task

To trace the history of a river . . . is to trace the history of the soul,
the history of the mind descending and arising in the body.
- Gretel Ehrlich

Even stones under
mountain waterfalls compose
odes to plum blossoms.
- Onitsura

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

Be still, sad heart, and cease repining;
Behind the clouds the sun is shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, An April Day

Till last by Philip's farm I flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.
- Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Brook

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. (New Directions Paperback.)

I am an optimist,
but I'm an optimist who carries a raincoat.
- Harold Wilson

Do not bathe if there is no water.
- Shan proverb

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

Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends,
have become global garbage cans.
- -Jacques Cousteau

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

For keenest enjoyment, I visit when the dew is on them,
or in cloudy weather, or when the rain is falling:
and I must be alone or with someone who cares for them as I do.
- David Fairchild

The river Rhine, it is well known,
Doth wash your city of Cologne;
But tell me, nymphs! what power divine
Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine?
- Samuel T. Coleridge, 1772-1834, Cologne

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

People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains, at the huge waves
of the seas, at the long course of the rivers, at the vast compass of the
ocean, at the circular motion of the stars, and yet they pass by
themselves without wondering.
- Saint Augustine

The quality of water and the quality of life in all its infinite forms
are critical parts of the overall, ongoing health of this planet of ours,
not just here in the Amazon, but everywhere... The hardest part
of any big project is to begin. We have begun. We are underway. W
e have a passion. We want to make a difference.
- Peter Blake

The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind in never weary;
The vine still clings to the mouldering wall,
But at every gust the dead leaves fall,
And the day is dark and dreary.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Rainy Day

"In order for something to become clean,
something else must become dirty."
- Imbesi's Conservation of Filth Law

If all the world's water were fit into a gallon jug,
the fresh water available for us to use would
equal only about one tablespoon.

A corn field of one acre gives off 4,000
gallons of water per day in evaporation.

It takes about 6 gallons of water to grow a single serving of lettuce.
More than 2,600 gallons is required to produce a single serving of steak.
- Water Facts

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

The drops of rain make a hole in the stone,
not by violence, but by oft falling.
- Lucretius

For many of us, water simply flows from a faucet, and we
think little about it beyond this point of contact. We have lost
a sense of respect for the wild river, for the complex workings
of a wetland, for the intricate web of life that water supports.
- Sandra Postel, Last Oasis: Facing Water Scarcity

The quality of mercy is not strained; It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed- It blesseth him that gives,
and him that takes.
- William Shakespeare

Tis rushing now adown the spout,
And gushing out below,
Half frantic in its joyousness,
And wild in eager flow.
The earth is dried and parched with heat,
And it hath long'd to be
Released from out the selfish cloud,
To cool the thirsty tree.
- Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Water

Living creatures are nourished by food, and food is nourished by rain; rain
itself is the water of life, which comes from selfless worship and service.
- Bhagavad Gita

It is not raining to me,
It's raining daffodils;
In every dimpled drop I see
Wild flowers on distant hills.
- Robert Loveman, April Rain

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

Water is fundamental for life and health. The human right to water
is indispensable for leading a healthy life in human dignity. It is a
pre-requisite to the realization of all other human rights.
- The United Nations Committee on Economic, Cultural and Social Rights

"Throughout the history of literature, the guy who poisons the well
has been the worst of all villains..."
-- Author unknown --

"Thousands have lived without love, not one without water."
W.H. Auden

"You could write the story of man's growth in terms of his epic concerns with water."
Bernard Frank

"Man is a complex being; he makes deserts bloom and lakes die."
Gil Stern

"And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters"
"Resolution and Independence", Henry Wordsworth

"And gentle winds and waters near, make music to the lonely ear."
"Parisina", Byron

"We think of our land and water and human resources not as static and sterile possessions but as lifegiving assets to be directed by wise provisions for future days."
Franklin D. Roosevelt

"There has been a lot said about the sacredness of our land which is our body; and the values of our culture which is our soul; but water is the blood of our tribes, and if its life-giving flow is stopped, or it is polluted, all else will die and the many thousands of years of our communal existence will come to an end."
Frank Tenorio, 1978

"Anyone who can solve the problems of water will be worthy of two Nobel prizes - one for peace and one for science."
John F. Kennedy

"A man from the west will fight over three things: water, women and gold, and usually in that order."
Senator Barry Goldwater, AZ

"Water is King, and he is Knight who uses it successfully to make two blades grow where nature produced none. "
J. S. Sherman, 1894. Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Convention of the Kansas Irrigation Association

"Til taught by pain, men really know not what good water is worth."
Fron "Don Juan" by Byron

"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."
Unknown author

"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)

"I have little need to remind you that water has become one of our major national concerns."
Ezra Taft Benson, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture.
(Opening sentence of the Foreword of the 1955 Yearbook of Agriculture - dedicated entirely to water)

"Water is life's matter and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water."
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Hungarian biochemist and Nobel Prize Winner for Medicine.

"In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water along with other resources has become the victim of his indifference."
Rachel Carson

"Don't you realize that the sea is the home of water? All water is off on a journey unless it's in the sea, and it's homesick, and bound to make its way home someday."
American folklorist and writer Zora Neale Hurston (1903-1960)

"Civilization has been a permanent dialogue between human beings and water."
Paolo Lugari (founder of the Gaviotas Community in Colombia)

"If we lived in a desert and our lives depended on a water supply that came out of a steel tube, we would inevitably watch that tube and talk about it understandingly. No citizen would need to be lectured about his duty toward its care and spurred to help if it were in danger. Teachers of civics in such a community might develop a sense of public responsibility, not only by describing the remote beginnings of the commonwealth, but also how that tube got built, how long it would last, how vital the intake might be if the rainfall on the forested mountains nearby ever changed in seasonal habit ot amount. It would be a most unimaginative person, or a stupid one, who could not see the vital relation between the mountains, the forests, that tube and himself."
Isaiah Bowman, "Headwaters Control and Use - Influence of Vegetation on Land-Water Relationships" 1937.

"Water is the most basic of all resources. Civilizations grew or withered depending on its availability."
Dr. Nathan W. Snyder, Ralph M. Parsons Engineering

"If we could ever competitively, at a cheap rate, get fresh water from saltwater, ..(this) would be in the long-range interests of humanity which could really dwarf any other scientific accomplishments."
John F. Kennedy

"...Good luck and Good work for the happy mountain raindrops, each one of them a high waterfall in itself, descending from the cliffs and hollows of the clouds to the cliffs and hollows of the rocks, out of the sky-thunder into the thunder of the falling rivers."
John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra

"Rain is a blessing when it falls gently on parched fields, turning the earth green, causing the birds to sing."
Donald Worster, "Meeting the Expectations of the Land", 1984

"Throughout the history of literature, the guy who poisons the well
has been the worst of all villains..."
-- Author unknown

"Thousands have lived without love, not one without water."
W.H. Auden

"The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea."
Tagore - a Bengali poet and novelist

"Water should not be judged by its history, but by its quality"
Dr Lucas Van Vuuren, National Institute of Water Research, South Africa

"A waster of water is a waster of better."
Old Irish Adage

"Water is a very good servant, but it is a cruel master."
C.G.D. Roberts, "Adrift in America", 1891

"The wise man of Miletus thus declared the first of things is water"
J.S. Blackie, 1877

"Nothing on earth is so weak and yielding as water, but for breaking down the firm and strong it has no equal."
Lao-Tsze

"In sweet water there is a pleasure ungrudged by anyone."
Ovid, 13 A.D.

"Solid stone is just sand and water...Sand and water and a million years gone by"
Beth Nielsen Chapman

"The noblest of the elements is water"
Pindar, 476 B.C.

"If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water"
Loran Eisley (Anthropologist), The Immense Journey, 1957

"Aquifer: a mysterious, magical and poorly defined area beneath the surface of the earth that either yields or withholds vast or lesser quantities of standing/flowing water, the quantity and/or quality of which is dependent on who is describing it or how much money may be at stake."
R. Radden, "Watershed Resources", Jan. 2002

"Water helped ancient man learn those first lessons about the rights of others and responsibility to a larger society.... It became part of the moral and mental legacy parents passed on to their children."
M. Meyer, "Water in the Hispanic Southwest"

“A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure.”
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (quoted by the Supreme Court in its decision in U.S. v. Republic Steel, 1960)

"Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It's called rain. "
Michael McClary

"Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over."
Mark Twain, 1884

"You could not step twice into the same rivers; for other waters are ever flowing on to you."
Heraclitus of Ephesus

"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.

"Water is sometimes sharp and sometimes strong, sometimes acid and sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet and sometimes thick or thin, sometimes it is seen bringing hurt or pestilence, sometime health-giving, sometimes poisonous. It suffers change into as many natures as are the different places through which it passes. And as the mirror changes with the colour of its subject, so it alters with the nature of the place, becoming noisome, laxative, astringent, sulfurous, salty, incarnadined, mournful, raging, angry, red, yellow, green, black, blue, greasy, fat or slim. Sometimes it starts a conflagration, sometimes it extinguishes one; is warm and is cold, carries away or sets down, hollows out or builds up, tears or establishes, fills or empties, raises itself or burrows down, speeds or is still; is the cause at times of life or death, or increase or privation, nourishes at times and at others does the contrary; at times has a tang, at times is without savor, sometimes submerging the valleys with great floods. In time and with water, everything changes"
Leonardo da Vinci

"When you drink the water, remember the spring"
Chinese Proverb

"When the well is dry, we learn the worth of water"
Benjamin Franklin

"Children of a culture born in a water-rich environment, we have never really learned how important water is to us. We understand it, but we do not respect it."
William Ashworth, Nor Any Drop to Drink, 1982

"Don't empty the water jar until the rain falls."
Philippine proverb

"The frog does not drink up the pond in which he lives."
American Indian Saying

"The stone in the water knows nothing of the hill which lies parched in the sun."
African Proverb

"The highest good is like water. Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive. It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao."
Excerpt from the Tao Te Ching, chapter 8

"By means of water, we give life to everything."
Koran, 21:30

"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

"Water links us to our neighbor in a way more profound and complex than any other."
John Thorson

"Water is the one substance from which the earth can conceal nothing; it sucks out its innermost secrets and brings them to our very lips."
Jean Giraudoux

"Water"
by Ralph Waldo Emerson; 1883
The water understands
Civilization well,
It wets my foot, but prettily,
It chills my life, but wittily,
It is not disconcerted,
It is not broken-hearted:

Well used, it decketh joy,
Adorneth, doubleth joy:
Ill used, it will destroy,
In perfect time and measure
With a face of golden pleasure
Elegantly destroy.

"Cologne"
by Samuel Coleridge; 1828
The Rhine River, it is well known,
Doth wash your city of Cologne;
But tell me, nymphs! what power devine
Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine?

"Water"
by Sir Alan Herbert
The rain is plenteous but, by God's decree,
Only a third is meant for you and me;
Two-thirds are taken by the growing things
Or vanish Heavenward on vapour's wings:
Nor does it mathematically fall
With social equity on one and all.
The population's habit is to grow
In every region where the water's low:
Nature is blamed for failings that are Man's,
And well-run rivers have to change their plans.

Words from Thomas H. Ferril, 1940

Here is the land where life is written in water
The West is where the water was and is
Father and son of old mother and daughter
Following rivers up immensities
of range and desert thirsting the sundown ever
Crossing a hill to climb a hill still drier
Naming tonight a city by some river
a different name from last night's camping fire
Look to the green within the mountain cup
look to the prairie parched for water lack
Look to the sun that pulls the oceans up
look to the cloud that gives the oceans back
Look to your heart and may your wisdom grow
to power of lightning and to peace of snow

"Ode, On the General Subject of Water"
by Kenneth Boulding; Feather River Anthology
Water is far from a simple commodity,
Water's a sociological oddity,
Water's a pasture for science to forage in,
Water's a mark of our dubious origin,
Water's a link with a distant futurity,
Water's a symbol of ritual purity.

Water is politics, Water's religion,
Water is just about anyone's pigeon.
Water is frightening, water's endearing,
Water's a lot more than mere engineering.
Water is tragical, water is comical,
Water is far from Pure Economical,
So studies of water, though free from aridity
Are apt to produce a good deal of turbidity.

"Two Tramps in Mud Time" (verse 5)
by Robert Frost, 1936

The water for which we may have to look
In summertime with a witching-wand,
In every wheelrut's now a brook,
In every print of a hoof a pond.
Be glad of water, but don't forget
The lurking frost in the earth beneath
That will steal forth after the sun is set
And show on the water its crystal teeth.

"Gunga Din" (first half of first verse)
by Rudyard Kipling, 1865

YOU may talk o' gin an' beer
When you're quartered safe out 'ere,
An' you're sent to penny-fights an' Aldershot it;
But if it comes to slaughter
You will do your work on water,
An' you'll lick the bloomin' boots of 'im that's got it.

"Just Add Water"
by David J. Ford

The words on labels tell this tale,
In recipes, in ads by mail,
And chances are, at work or play,
You'll see these famous words today -
Just add water.

You'd be surprised how many things
Are dry and useless till one brings
The magic liquid known to all;
You use it when you heed the call -
Just add water.

To illustrate and prove this thought,
Remember all the food you've bought
On which was printed, clear and bright,
Instructions that make cooking light -
Just add water.

You now can buy
Dried fruits, or soups, or tasty cakes;
To powdered milk and frozen juices,
To products with a thousand uses,
Just add water.

Imagine for a minute, please,
An arid wasteland, bare of trees;
This could be farmland, rich and good
And quite productive if we could
Just add water.

What turns cement into concrete?
What changes seed to golden wheat?
No other words now known to man
Can answer that: but these words can:
Just add water.

In one drop of water are found all the secrets of all the oceans.
-- Kahlil Gibran

An ocean refuses no river.
Sheila Chandra

To plunge into water, to move ones' whole body, from head to toe, in its wild graceful beauty, to twist about in its pure depths, this is for me a delight only comparable to love.
Paul Valery, quoted in Haunts of the Black Masseur

The same stream of life that runs through the world runs through my veins night and day.
It is the same life that emerges in joy through the dust of the earth into numberless waves of flowers.
Rabindranath Tagore

When you hear the splash
Of the water drops that fall
Into your stone bowl,
You will feel that all the dust
Of your mind is washed away.
Zen Tea Master Sen-No-Rikyu

all this water talk
after drinking a coffee
makes me need to pee
David Senn (a haiku inspired by this web page)

Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
John Updike

Rain! whose soft architectural hands have power to cut stones, and chisel to shapes of grandeur the very mountains.
Henry Ward Beecher

I want nothing
of the river
and it clearly

wants nothing of
me. Yet as it
flows out of the

mountains into
my eyes the heart
becomes a sea.
Cid Corman

Water--the ace of elements.
Water dives from the clouds without parachute, wings or safety net. Water runs over the steepest precipice and blinks not a lash. Water is buried and rises again; water walks on fire and fire gets the blisters. Stylishly composed in any situation--soild, gas or liquid--speaking in penetrating dilects understood by all things--animal, vegetable or mineral-- water travels intrepidly through four dimensions, sustaining... destroying... creating...
Tom Robbins, from the preface to Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Till taught by pain, men know not water's worth.
Byron

However quick the stream may be,
It does not carry away the reflection of the moon.
Traditional Zen proverb

Rise above the dualities, the opposites. See this whole world as the bubbles on the surface of water. See people as bubbles on the surface of the Brahman, of the Infinity...Water bubbles up, rises up. Like that, everybody is rising and having their own games and plays and dissolving back into the Infinite.
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, from Everything is God

Live water heals memories. I look up the creek and here it comes, the future being borne aloft as on a winding succession of laden trays. You may wake and look from the window and breathe the real air, and say, with satisfaction or with longing, "This is it." But if you look up the creek, if you look up the creek in any weather, your spirit fills, and you are saying, with an exulting rise of the lungs, "Here it comes!"
Annie Dillard, from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

The Cloud
I am the daughter of Earth and Water
And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die.
For after the rain when with never a stain
The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams
Build up the blue dome of air,
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

...just as the spirit of humanity dwells in the pages of a book, so does the Spirit of god dwell in the waters of a river. If the former can elevate our hearts, so undoubtedly can the latter.
Much is known to the heart that cannot be expressed, much that is almost entirely forgotten in the course of an education which concerns itself with learning to express quite other things. But one thing is certain, namely, that a river is most emphatically not just a river.
Sri Krishna Prem, from Initiation into Yoga

And you, vast sea, sleepless mother,
Who alone are peace and freedom to the river and the stream,
Only another winding will this stream make, only another murmer in this glade,
And then shall I come to you, a boundless drop to a boundless ocean.
Kahlil Gibran, from The Prophet

The dream of my life
is to lie down by a slow river
and stare at the light in the trees ~
to learn something by being nothing
Mary Oliver, from "Entering the Kingdom"

here's to opening and upward, to leaf and to sap
and to your self whose eyes smell of the sound of rain

and here's to silent certainly mountains; and to
a disappearing poet of always; and to snow
and to morning; and to morning's beautiful friend
twilight (and a first dream called ocean)
e.e. cummings

I thank the earth for feeding my body,
I thank the sun for warming my bones,
I thank the trees for the air I breathe,
And I thank the water for nourishing my soul.
Leah Wolfsong

And if the earth has forgotten you
Say to the still earth: I am flowing.
To the rushing waters say: I am.
Rilke, from Sonnets to Orpheus

What soap is for the body, tears are for the soul.
Hassidic proverb

Spring Pools
These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.

The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods -
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.
Robert Frost

Water has become a highly precious resource. There are some places where a barrel of water costs more than a barrel of oil.
Lloyd Axworthy, Foreign Minister of Canada (1999 - News Conference)

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.
LORAN EISELY, The Immense Journey, 1957

Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third thing, that makes water and nobody knows what that is.
D.H. LAWRENCE (1885-1930), Pansies, 1929

Water has no taste, no color, no odor; it cannot be defined, art relished while ever mysterious. Not necessary to life, but rather life itself. It fills us with a gratification that exceeds the delight of the senses.
ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY (1900-1944), Wind, Sand, and Stars, 1939

Water is the one substance from which the earth can conceal nothing; it sucks out its innermost secrets and brings them to our very lips.
JEAN GIRAUDOUX (1882-1944), The Madwomen of Chaillot, 1946

When the well is dry, we know the worth of water.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, (1706-1790), Poor Richard's Almanac, 1746

The crisis of our diminishing water resources is just as severe (if less obviously immediate) as any wartime crisis we have ever faced. Our survival is just as much at stake as it was at the time of Pearl Harbor, or the Argonne, or Gettysburg, or Saratoga
JIM WRIGHT, U.S. Representative, The Coming Water Famine, 1966

High quality water is more than the dream of the conservationists, more than a political slogan; high quality water, in the right quantity at the right place at the right time, is essential to health, recreation, and economic growth.
EDMUND S. MUSKIE, U.S. Senator, speech, 1 March 1966

Children of a culture born in a water-rich environment, we have never really learned how important water is to us. We understand it, but we do not respect it.
WILLIAM ASHWORTH, Nor Any Drop to Drink, 1982

Of all our planet's activities--geological movements, the reproduction and decay of biota, and even the disruptive propensities of certain species (elephants and humans come to mind)--no force is greater than the hydrologic cycle.
RICHARD BANGS and CHRISTIAN KALLEN, Rivergods, 1985

Between earth and earth's atmosphere, the amount of water remains constant; there is never a drop more, never a drop less. This is a story of circular infinity, of a planet birthing itself.
LINDA HOGAN, Northern Lights, Autumn 1990

Filthy water cannot be washed.
WEST AFRICAN PROVERB

If you could tomorrow morning make water clean in the world, you would have done, in one fell swoop, the best thing you could have done for improving human health by improving environmental quality.

WILLIAM C. CLARK, speech, Racine, Wisconsin, April 1988
------------------------------------------------------------------------

In every glass of water we drink, some of the water has already passed through fishes, trees, bacteria, worms in the soil, and many other organisms, including people...Living systems cleanse water and make it fit, among other things, for human consumption.

ELLIOT A. NORSE, in R.J. Hoage, ed., Animal Extinctions, 1985
------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Chesapeake Bay is] an immense outdoor protein factory.

H.L. MENCKEN (1880-1956), Happy Days, 1940
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Estuaries are a happy land, rich in the continent itself, stirred by the forces of nature like the soup of a French chef; the home of myriad forms of life from bacteria and protozoan to grasses and mammals; the nursery, resting place, and refuge of countless.

STANELY A. CAIN, speech, 1966
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Many estuaries produce more harvestable human food per acre than the best midwestern farmland.

STANELY A. CAIN, testimony, U.S. House of Representatives, Merchant Marine and Fisheries subcommittee, March 1967
------------------------------------------------------------------------

The estuary is the point where man, the sea--his immemorialally and adversary-and the land meet and challenge each other.

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR, National Estuarine Pollution Study, November 1969
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Life originated in the sea, and about eighty percent of it is still there.

ISAAC ASIMOV, Isaac Asimov's Book of Science and Nature Quotations, 1988
------------------------------------------------------------------------

The oceans are the planet's last great living wilderness, man's only remaining frontier on earth, and perhaps his last chance to produce himself a rational species.

JOHN L. CULLNEY, Wilderness Conservation, September- October 1990

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free, Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea.

SIDNEY LANIER (1842-1881), "The Marshes of Glynn," 1878