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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"And it was always the stories that needed the telling that gave us the rope we could cross any river with. They balanced us high above any crevasse. They made us be natural acrobats. They made us brave. They met us well. They changed us. It was in their nature to."
"She watched the prairies the rivers, the towns slipping past at an untouchable distance below - and she noted that the sense of detachment one feels when looking at the earth from a plane was the same sense she felt when looking at people: only her distance from people seemed longer. - Dagny Taggart"
"So tomorrow we disappear into the unknown. This account I am transmitting down the river by canoe, and it may be our last word to those who are interested in our fate."
"We can none of us step into the same river twice, but the river flows on and the other river we step into is cool and refreshing, too"
"The muddy rivers of spring Are snarling Under the muddy skies. The mind is muddy."
"They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it."
"One afternoon late in October of the year 1697, Euclide Auclair, the philosopher apothecary of Quebec, stood on the top of Cap Diamant gazing down the broad, empty river far beneath him."
"Oh, river! darkling river! what a voice Is that thou utterest while all else is still-- The ancient voice that, centuries ago, Sounded between thy hills, while Rome was yet A weedy solitude by Tiber's stream!"
"Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet; She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet. She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree; But I, being young and foolish, with her did not agree. In a field by the river my love and I did stand, And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand. She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs; But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears."
"I have not been on any river that has more of a distinctive personality than does the Missouri River. It's a river that immediately presents to the traveler, 'I am a grandfather spirit. I have a source; I have a life."
"There is a river in Macedon, and there is moreover a river in Monmouth. It is called Wye at Monmouth, but it is out of my prains what is the name of the other river; but 'tis all one, 'tis alike as my fingers is to my fingers, and there is salmons in both."
"A Primrose by a river's brim A yellow primrose was to him And it was something more."
"I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, wherever nature led."
"History is a river that never ends. Today is history, and I am here at the fountainhead."
"By perceiving ourselves as part of the river, we take responsibility for the river as a whole."
"I just can't stand jazz/rock. I think it's the worst thing that's come down the river yet."
"I journeyed to London, to the timekept City, Where the River flows, with foreign flotations. There I was told: we have too many churches, And too few chop-houses."
"In its mysterious past it encompasses all the dim origins of life and receives in the end, after, it may be, many transmutations, the dead husks of that same life. For all at last return to the sea - to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end."
"We're all water from different rivers, That's why it's so easy to meet, We're all water in this vast, vast ocean, Someday we'll evaporate together."
"There have been many occasions when I found it helpful to talk out loud to my own thoughts, ordering the unwholesome ones to go off somewhere and jump into the river."
