Rivers quotes
1.6K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside rivers — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Fishtale River Guides are personable and very knowledgeable. I like a guide who'll talk to me and explain what's going on. They work hard to help me catch my fish. I fish with them at least twice a year."
"Depending on how quickly you get ocean rise, you have people who live in river deltas [at risk]."
"Time moves only forward, never back. We look forward to a moment and then it arrives and an instant later it is gone. Like something on the surface of a river that we reached for but did not touch in time and it carried on, away. You cannot be a prisoner of your past against your will. Because you can only live in the past inside your mind."
"Dip him in the river who loves water."
"We are asking the nations of Europe between whom rivers of blood have flowed, to forget the feuds of a thousand years and work for the larger harmonies on which the future depends."
"Mother Nature is always speaking. She speaks in a language understood within the peaceful mind of the sincere observer. Leopards, cobras, monkeys, rivers and trees; they all served as my teachers when I lived as a wanderer in the Himalayan foothills."
"All these souls, after they have passed away a thousand years, are summoned by the divine ones in great array, to the lethean river. . . . In this way they become forgetful of the former earthlife, and re-visit the vaulted realms of the world, willing to return again into living bodies."
"He found that he had this sudden desperate longing for the fuming, smoky streets of Ankh-Morpork, which was always at its best in the spring, when the gummy sheen on the turbid waters of the Ankh River had a special iridescence and the eaves were full of birdsong, or at least birds coughing rhythmically"
"The river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for supper."
"Men as well as rivers grow crooked by following the path of least resistance."
"You want soldiers who, when they get to a river after a long march, don't start rooting for their canteen in their pack, but just dive right in."
"Please let him come, and give me the resilience & guts to make him respect me, be interested, and not to throw myself at him with loudness or hysterical yelling; calmly, gently, easy baby easy. He is probably strutting the backs among crocuses now with seven Scandinavian mistresses. And I sit, spiderlike, waiting, here, home; Penelope weaving webs of Webster, turning spindles of Tourneur. Oh, he is here; my black marauder; oh hungry hungry. I am so hungry for a big smashing creative burgeoning burdened love: I am here; I wait; and he plays on the banks of the river Cam like a casual faun."
"Soul, a moving river. Body, the riverbed."
"On and on they flew, over the countryside parceled out in patches of green and brown, over roads and rivers winding through the landscapes like strips of matte and glossy ribbon."
"If a man is crossing the river and an empty boat collides with his skiff, even though he is a bad tempered man he will not become very angry. But if he sees a man in the other boat he will scream and shout and curse at the man to steer clear. If you can empty your own boat crossing the river of the world, no one will oppose you, no one will seek to harm you. Thus is the perfect man - his boat is empty."
"We like to put sacred texts in flowing waters, so I rolled it up, tied it to a piece of wood, placed a dandelion on top, and floated it in the stream which flows into the Swat River. Surely God would find it there."
"Know from the rivers in clefts and in crevices: those in small channels flow noisily, the great flow silent. Whatever's not full makes noise. Whatever is full is quiet."
"Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid."
"Everyone grows and changes. It's not even to say that you become a better person than you were, but you're morphing. This whole thing is just a weird river that we're on."
"There are many different rivers that lead into despair: there's poverty; there's political repression; there's gender apartheid - there's a sense of culture loss; there's religious fanaticism."
