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WATER ´QUOTESWater, the Hub of Life.
Water is its mater and matrix, mother and medium.
Water is the most extraordinary substance!
Practically all its properties are anomolous, which enabled life to use it as building
material for its machinery.
Life is water dancing to the tune of solids.
- Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (1972)
Water is the driver of Nature.
- Leonardo da Vinci
We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.
- Jacques Cousteau
A river seems a magic thing. A magic, moving, living part of the very earth itself.
- Laura Gilpin - From The Rio Grande, 1949
All the water that will ever be is, right now.
- National Geographic, October 1993
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, 1970
Water is H20, 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, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever
mysterious. Not necessary to life, but rather life itself, thou fillest 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's 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. 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
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
protozoans to grasses and mammals; the nursery, resting place, and refuge of
countless things.
- Stanely A. Cain, speech, 1966
Many estuaries produce more harvestable human food per acre than the best midwestern
farmland.
- Stanely A. Cain, speech, 1966, testimony, U.S. House of Representatives,
Merchant Marine and Fisheries subcomittee, March 1967
{The estuary} is the point where man, the sea-his immemorial ally 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 Aasimov, 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
The marsh, to him who enters it in a receptive mood, holds, besides mosquitoes and
stagnation, melody, the mystery of unknown waters, and the sweetness of Nature undisturbed
by man.
- Charles William Beebe (1877-1962), Log of the Sun, 1906
Wetlands have a poor public image. . . Yet they are among the earth's greatest natural
assets. . . mankind's waterlogged wealth.
- Edward Maltby, Waterlogged Wealth, 1986
Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and
cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever
is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft is strong.
- Lao-Tzu (600 B.C.)
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
- Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1798
For we needs must die, and are as WATER spilt on the ground, which cannot be gathered up
again; neither doth God respect any person
- II Samuel 14.14
That which is now a horse, even with a thought
The rack dislimms, and makes it indistinct
As water is in water
- Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra, Act 4, Scene 12, 1, 2
By the shores of Gitchee Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis,
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.
- Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha, 1855
A little water clears us of this deed
- Skakespeare, Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 2, 1.68
Gutta cavat lapidem (Dripping water hollows out a stone)
- Ovid, Epistulae Ex Ponto, Book 3, no. 10, 1. 5
Here lies one whose name was writ in WATER
- John Keats, Epitaph for himself, in Richard Monkton Milnes Life, Letters and
Literary Remains of John Keats, 1848, vol. 2
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 towardsits 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, 1951
When you put your hand in a flowing stream, you touch the last that has gone before and
the first of what is still to come."
- Leonardo da Vinci
To trace the history of a river or a raindrop…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 upon divinity, which like feeding the lake, and the spring becoming a waterfall,
feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself all over again."
- Gretel Ehrlich - From Islands, The Universe, Home, 1991
"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 - From The Wind in the Willows
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
To live by a large river is to be kept in the heart of things.
- John Haines
You could not step twice into the same rivers; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.
- Heraclitus of Ephesus
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
Water is the most critical resource issue of our lifetime and our children's lifetime.
The health of our waters is the principal measure of how we live on the land."
- Luna Leopold
A river is the report card for its watershed.
- Alan Levere
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 Maclean - From A River Runs Through It
Many a time have I merely closed my eyes at the end of yet another troublesome day and
soaked my bruised psyche in wild water, rivers remembered and rivers imagined.
Rivers course through my dreams, rivers cold and fast, rivers well-known and
rivers nameless, rivers that seem like ribbons of blue water twisting through wide
valleys, narrow rivers folded in layers of darkening shadows, rivers that have eroded
down deep into a mountain's belly, sculpted the land. Peeled back the planet's history
exposing the texture of time itself.
- Harry Middleton
We let a river shower its banks with a spirit that invades the people living there,
and we protect that river, knowing that without its blessings the people have no source
of soul.
- Thomas Moore
A river sings a holy song conveying the mysterious truth that we are a river, and if we
are ignorant of this natural law, we are lost.
- From The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life
Rivers are magnets for the imagination, for conscious pondering and subconscious dreams,
thrills and 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. The water calls up our own ambitions of flowing
with ease, of navigating the unknown. Streams represent constant rebirth.
The waters flow in, forever new, yet forever the same; they complete a journey from
beginning to end, and then they embark on the journey again."
- Tim Palmer - From Lifelines
When we save a river, we save a major part of an ecosystem, and we save ourselves as well
because of our dependence--physical, economic, spiritual,--on the water and its community
of life.
- Tim Palmer, - The Wild and Scenic Rivers of America
Anything else you're interested in is not going to happen if you can't breathe the air
and drink the water. Don't sit this one out. Do something. You are by accident of fate
alive at an absolutely critical moment in the history of our planet."
- Carl Sagan
All things are connected, like the blood that runs in your family…The water's murmur is the
voice of my father's father." 1854
The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. They carry our canoes and feed our
children. You must give to the rivers the kindness you would give to any brother.
- Chief Seattle
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
To the lost man, to the pioneer penetrating a new country, to the naturalist who wishes
to see the wild land at its wildest, the advice is always the same -- follow a river.
The river is the original forest highway. It is nature's own Wilderness Road.
- Edwin Way Teale
I chatter, chatter as I flow to join the brimming river, for men may come and men may go,
but I go on forever.
- Lord Tennyson- From The Brook, 1887
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
It was a kind of solemn, drifting down the big still river, laying on our backs looking
up at the stars, and we didn't even feel like talking loud, and it wasn't often that we
laughed, only a little kind of low chuckle.
- Mark Twain
When they went ashore the animals that took up a land life carried with them a part of the
sea in their bodies, a heritage which they passed on to their children and which even
today links each land animal with its origin in the ancient sea.
Fish, amphibian, and reptile, warm-blooded bird and mammal - each of us carries in our
veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined
in almost the same proportions as in sea water. This is our inheritance from the day,
untold millions of years ago, when a remote ancestor, having progressed from the
one-celled stage, first developed a circulatory system in which the fluid was merely
the water of the sea. In the same way, our lime-hardened skeletons are a heritage from
the calcium-rich ocean of Cambrian time. Even the protoplasm that streams within each
cell of our bodies has the chemical structure impressed upon all living matter when the
first simple creatures were brought forth in the ancient sea. And as life itself began
in the sea, so each of us begins his individual life in a miniature ocean within his
mother’s womb, and in the stages of his embryonic development repeats the steps by
which his race evolved, from gill-breathing inhabitants of a water world to creatures
able to live on land.”
- R. Carson - The Sea Around Us (1951)
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. We have a passion. We want to make a difference.
- Sir Peter Blake (1948-2001) -last journal entry before being murdered
by pirates on the Amazon River
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 (1819-1891), Moby Dick, 1851
Water is also one of the four elements, the most beautiful of God's creations. It is both
wet and cold, heavy, and with a tendency to descend, and flows with great readiness.
It is this the Holy Scripture has in view when it says, "And the darkness was upon the
face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."
Water, then, is the most beautiful element and rich in usefulness, and purifies from all
filth, and not only from the filth of the body but from that of the soul, if it should
have received the grace of the Spirit.
- John of Damascus (679?-749) Exposition of the Orthodox Faith
Water, like religion and ideology, has the power to move millions of people.
Since the very birth of human civilization, people have moved to settle close to it.
People move when there is too little of it. People move when there is too much of it.
People journey down it. People write, sing and dance about it. People fight over it.
And all people, everywhere and every day, need it.
- Mikhail Gorbachev, President of Green Cross International quoted in
Peter Swanson's Water: The Drop of Life, 2001BBC News, "Water arithmetic 'doesn't add up'," 13 Mar 2000
And Allah has created from water every living creature: so of them is that which walks
upon its belly, and of them is that which walks upon two feet, and of them is that
which walks upon four; Allah creates what He pleases; surely Allah has power over all things.
- Qur'an 24.45, M. H. Shakir's translation
In a mucked up lovely river, I cast my little fly.
I look at that river and smell it and it makes me wanna cry.
Oh to clean our dirty planet, now there's a noble wish,
and I'm puttin my shoulder to the wheel
'cause I wanna catch some fish.
- Greg Brown, "Spring Wind" from Dream Café, 1992
With respect to water, Canadians and Americans suffer from the same disease: We say that
it is priceless, but act as if it were absurdly cheap. Most North Americans pay far less
for their water than even just the cost of supplying it, cleaning it up and returning
it to the environment. Yet subsidizing water use is economically and ecologically disastrous.
In fact, heavy subsidization of water in the US is the cause of any water "shortages" that
may exist there.
- Editorial, The Toronto Globe and Mail, 23 May 1998
My soul is full of longing
For the secret of the Sea,
And the heart of the great ocean
Sends a thrilling pulse through me.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), The Secret of the Sea
If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there,
but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.
- Rachel Carson (1907-1964) accepting the National Book Award for
The Sea Around Us, 1952
The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book- a book that was a dead language
to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering
its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice.
And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell
every day.
- Mark Twain a.k.a. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910)
Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or
other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel
such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of
land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate
deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning.
And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp
the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned.
But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans.
It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
- Herman Melville (1819-1891), Moby Dick, 1851
I understood when I was just a child that without water, everything dies.
I didn't understand until much later that no one "owns" water.
It might rise on your property, but it just passes through.
You can use it, and abuse it, but it is not yours to own.
It is part of the global commons, not "property" but part of our life support system.
- Marq de Villiers, Water, 2000
A river seems a magic thing. A magic, moving, living part of the very earth itself.
- Laura Gilpin, The Rio Grande, 1949
All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come
from, there they return again.
- Ecclesiastes 1:7 from New International Version of The Bible
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 conveuor 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. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine.
- T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) from Four Quartets
So much water is pumped in and out of underground aquifers in the Los Angeles
area that much of the landscape rises and falls more than 4 inches each year…
The immense annual groundswell caused by pumping practices is 100 times larger
than normal seismic fluctuations. It is particularly notable in northern parts
of Orange County, where 75% of all the water used is pumped from the ground.
The ground movement overshadows the more subtle tectonic forces at work along
Southern California's countless thrust faults, the researchers said.
"It is actually quite astonishing," said geophysicist Gerald Bawden at the
U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, who led the study team.
"The magnitude and extent of these motions are a product of Los Angeles' great
thirst for water; they are unprecedented, and have not been observed elsewhere in the world."
- Robert Lee Hotz and Kenneth Reich, "Aquifer Levels May Lift, Lower L.A. Land,"
Los Angeles Times, 23 Aug 2001
The trouble with water—and there is trouble with water—is that they're not making any
more of it. They're not making any less, mind, but no more either.
There is the same amount of water in the planet now as there was in prehistoric times.
People, however, they're making more of—many more, far more than is ecologically
sensible—and all those people are utterly dependent on water for their lives
(humans consist mostly of water), for their livelihoods, their food, and increasingly,
their industry. Humans can live for a month without food but will die in less than a week
without water. Humans consume water, discard it, poison it, waste it, and restlessly
change the hydrological cycles, indifferent to the consequences: too many people,
too little water, water in the wrong places and in the wrong amounts.
- Marq de Villiers, Water, 2000
Only one-third of the water that annually runs to the sea is accessible to humans. Of this,
more than half is already being appropriated and used. This proportion might not seem so
much, but demand will double in thirty years. And much of what is available is degraded
by eroded silt, sewage, industrial pollution, chemicals, excess nutrients, and plagues of
algae. Per capita availability of good, potable water is diminishing in all developed and
developing countries.
- Marq de Villiers, Water, 2000
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink.
Water, water everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" 1798
The real conflict of the beach is not between sea and shore, for theirs is only a lover's
quarrel, but between man and nature. On the beach, nature has achieved a dynamic
equilibrium that is alien to man and his static sense of equilibrium. Once a line has been
established, whether it be a shoreline or a property line, man unreasonably expects it to
stay put.
- G. Soucie, Smithsonian 1973
Don't throw away the old bucket until you know whether the new one holds water.
- Swedish proverb
The wars of the twenty-first century will be fought over water.
- Ismail Serageldin, World Bank Vice President for Environmental Affairs,
quoted in Marq de Villiers' Water, 2000
A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king,
and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
- Shakespeare (Hamlet)
He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along,
suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. Never in his life had
he seen a river before -- this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing
and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh,
to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were
caught and held again. All as a-shake and a-shiver -- glints and gleams
and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched,
entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots,
when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spellbound by exciting
stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still
chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world,
sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.
- Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
The cure for anything is salt water sweat, tears, or the sea.
- Isak Dinesen
Enough shovels of earth - a mountain. Enough pails of water - a river.
- Chinese Proverb
If you wish to drown, do not torture yourself with shallow water.
- Bulgarian Proverb
Only a fool tests the depth of the water with both feet.
- African Proverb
The deeper the waters are, the more still they run.
- Korean Proverb
The formula for water is H2O. Is the formula for an ice cube H2O squared?
- Lily Tomlin
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