Water Quotes

Are any of these quotes meaningful to you? In what way? Can you write a quote about water?

Water is the best of all things.
Pindar (C. 522-C. 438 B.C.), Olympian Odes

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

All the water that will ever be is, right now.
National Geographic, October 1993

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

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

We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.
Jacques Cousteau

Water is the driver of Nature.
Leonardo Da Vinci

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

Water sustains all.
Thales Of Miletus, 600 B.C.

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

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

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

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

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

When the well is dry, we know the worth of water.
Benjamin Franklin, 1746

I really don't know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it's because in addition to the fact that the sea changes, and the light changes, and ships change, it's because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea -- whether it is to sail or to watch it -- we are going back from whence we came.
John F. Kennedy, Jr., 1962

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

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

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

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

Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It's called rain. Michael McClary
Most of us, I suppose, are a little nervous of the sea. No matter what its smiles may be, we doubt its friendship.
H.M. Tomlinson

An ocean refuses no river.
Sheila Chandra

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

You'll never miss the water 'til the well runs dry.
Father of the Blues Alabamian W.C. Handy

Earth and water, if not too blatantly abused, can produce again and again for the benefit of all.
Stewart L. Udall

Boundaries don't protect rivers, people do.
Brad Arrowsmith, landowner along the Niobrara National Scenic River, Nebraska

The song of the river ends not at her banks but in the hearts of those who have loved her.
Buffalo Joe

In a country where nature has been so lavish and where we have been so spendthrift of indigenous beauty, to set aside a few rivers in their natural state should be considered an obligation.
Senator Frank Church from Idaho

A river is the cosiest of friends. You must love it and live with it before you can know it.
G.W. Curtis, Lotus Eating: Hudson and Rhine

Rivers are inherently interesting. They mold landscapes, create fertile deltas, provide trade routes, a source for food and water; a place to wash and play; civilizations emerged next to rivers in China, India, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. They sustain life and bring death and destruction. They are ferocious at times; gentle at times. They are placid and mean. They trigger conflict and delineate boundaries. Rivers are the stuff of metaphor and fable, painting and poetry. Rivers unite and divide -- a thread that runs from source to exhausted release.
Edward Gargan, The River's Tale

A river seems a magic thing. A magic, moving, living part of the very earth itself.
Laura Gilpin, The Rio Grande

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

. . . the time has also come to identify and preserve free-flowing stretches of our great rivers before growth and development make the beauty of the unspoiled waterway a memory.
President Lyndon Johnson's Message on Natural Beauty

I started out thinking of America as highways and state lines. As I got to know it better, I began to think of it as rivers. Most of what I love about the country is a gift of the rivers. . . . America is a great story, and there is a river on every page of it.
Charles Kuralt, On the Road With Charles Kuralt

Rivers run through our history and folklore, and link us as a people. They nourish and refresh us and provide a home for dazzling varieties of fish and wildlife and trees and plants of every sort. We are a nation rich in rivers.
Charles Kuralt, On the Road With Charles Kuralt

In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.
Lao-Tzu, Chinese philosopher (6th century B.C.)

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, Hydrologist

To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.
Barry Lopez, Author

A river, though, has so many things to say that it is hard to know what it says to each of us.
Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It

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, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life

Can we afford clean water? Can we afford rivers and lakes and streams and oceans which continue to make possible life on this planet? Can we afford life itself? Those questions were never asked as we destroyed the waters of our nation, and they deserve no answers as we finally move to restore and renew them. These questions answer themselves.
Senator Ed Muskie of Maine, arguing for the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972

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

Lying like short curls of thread thrown onto a map, the protected rivers remain strongholds of the free-flow and refuges of the riparian Eden, of the mountain farmer and the rural landowner. The rivers are stretched-out green reserves overflowing with life, potential, and promise.
Tim Palmer, The Wild and Scenic Rivers of America

Rivers are exquisite in their abilities to nurture life, sublime in functioning detail, impressive in contributions of global significance.
Tim Palmer, Lifelines

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

The river is the center of the land, the place where the waters, and much more, come together. Here is the home of wildlife, the route of explorers, and recreation paradise. . . .
Tim Palmer, 1986

A river does not just happen; it has a beginning and and end. Its story is written in rich earth, in ice, and in water-carved stone, and its story as the lifeblood of the land is filled with colour, music and thunder.
Andy Russell, The Life of a River

Who hears the rippling of rivers will not utterly despair of anything.
Henry David Thoreau

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

Water--the soul of the earth.
Robert A Swanson

Water is the soul of the Earth.
W.H. Auden

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

All things are connected, like the blood that runs in your family…The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father.
Chief Seattle, 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

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

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

Men go back to the mountains, as they go back to sailing ships at sea, because in the mountains and on the sea they must face up, as did men of another age, to the challenge of nature. Modern man lives in a highly synthetic kind of existence. He specializes in this and that. Rarely does he test all his powers or find himself whole. But in the hills and on the water the character of a man comes out.
Abram T. Collier

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