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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"fate is strange.. almost no one i know married the first love of their lives. but for those who did are always telling me that they missed soemthing important, that they didn’t experience all that they might have.." - by the river piedra i sat down and wept"
"Sometimes it is impossible to stop the river of life."
"I understand that everything is connected, that all roads meet, and that all rivers flow into the same sea."
"The River adapts itself to whatever route prove possible, but the river never forgets its one objective: the sea. So fragile at its source, it gradually gathers the strength of the other rivers in encounters. And, after a certain point, its power is absolute."
"The old people, they struggled, they fought the elements, they fought everything was against them here. The river, the summers and the heat. So finally when they settled Hurricane there and got the water on that bench, most of them left."
"Oh, that river of wishes, the slippery crocodile dream of it, how it might have carried my body down through all the glittering sand bars to the sea."
"And travellers, now, within that valley, Through the red-litten windows see Vast forms, that move fantastically To a discordant melody, While, like a ghastly rapid river, Through the pale door A hideous throng rush out forever And laugh — but smile no more."
"It's so much easier and cheaper to keep the river uncontaminated in the first place than it is to clean it up again once it's been polluted."
"There's a lot of dancing in football. You can see Victor Cruz doing a little bit of a cha-cha or samba move in the end zone. You can see Terrell Owens getting his popcorn ready. You can see Ochocinco doing the Riverdance. But not so much when it comes to ballroom."
"The majority of American writers today have chosen passive non-resistance to things as they are, producing sloughs of poetry about their personal angst and anomie, cascades of short stories and rivers of novels obsessed with the nuances of domestic relationships - suburban hanky-panky - chic boutique shopping mall literary soap opera. When they do speak out on matters of controversy they attack not the evils of our time but fellow writers who may insist on complaining."
"Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expence of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with with those of the neighbourhood of the town. They are upon that the greatest of all improvements."
"Hegemony is not defined by rivers or conventional borders - it's dominance, it's influence. So we get to decide in our hearts, are we in Iraq to help restore something, or are we there to establish dominance? How can you torture people and say, well, that's just a few bad apples in our culture?"
"Tears are another river that takes us home. We become alive with tears. There isn't a chance to return to sleep when we are weeping."
"The human body is river of intelligence, energy and information that is constantly renewing itself in every second of its existence."
"One realization does dawn upon the death of the second parent, namely that you've now moved into the green room to the River Styx. You're next."
"Self abandoned, relaxed and effortless, I seemed to have laid me down in the dried-up bed of a great river; I heard a flood loosened in remote mountains, I felt the torrent come; to rise I had no will, to flee I had no strength."
"I keep drawing the trees, the rocks, the river, I'm still learning how to see them; I'm still discovering how to render their forms. I will spend a lifetime doing that. Maybe someday I'll get it right."
"Rivers are highways that move on and bear us whither we wish to go."
"If you have someone falling out of the boat, you'd have to drag the boat up the river and film the same scene ten times, every time, dragging the boat exactly where it was up the river."
"I love swimming in rivers, and well remember once jumping in at Chiswick."
