Quotes about water
page 17

Muammar Gaddafi photo

“[Somali maritime violence] is a response to greedy Western nations, who invade and exploit Somalia's water resources illegally. It is not a piracy, it is self defence. It is defending the Somalia children's food.”

Muammar Gaddafi (1942–2011) Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist

Remarks at African Union headquarters, quoted in Daily Nation (5 February 2009) " Gaddafi defends Somali pirates http://www.nation.co.ke/News/africa/-/1066/525348/-/13rtrgiz/-/index.html" by Argaw Ahine

Sarvajna photo
James A. Michener photo
Vitruvius photo
George Bird Evans photo
John Bright photo

“The Corn Law is as great a robbery of the man who follows the plough as it is of him who minds the loom…If there be one view of the question which stimulates me to harder work in this cause than another, it is the fearful sufferings which I know to exist amongst the rural laborers in almost every part of this kingdom…And then a fat and sleek dean, a dignitary of the Church and a great philosopher, recommends for the consumption of the people—he did not read a paper about the supplies that were to be had in the great valley of the Mississippi—but he said that there were swede, turnip and mangel-wurzel; and the Hereditary Earl Marshal of England, if to out-Herod Herod himself, recommends hot water and a pinch of curry-powder. The people of England have not, even under thirty years of Corn Law influence, been sunk so low as to submit tamely to this insult and wrong. It is enough that a law should be passed to make your toil valueless, to make your skill and labor unavailing to procure for you a fair supply of the common necessaries of life—but when to this grievous iniquity they add the insult of telling you to go, like beasts that perish, to mangel-wurzel, or to something which even the beasts themselves cannot eat, then I believe the people of England will rise, and with one voice proclaim the downfall of this odious system.”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech at an Anti-Corn Law League meeting (summer 1843), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), pp. 93-94.
1840s

William S. Burroughs photo
Joanna Newsom photo
David Baboulene photo
Kent Hovind photo

“Technically, one drop of water would cover the planet, if you spread it really thin.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Hovind theory

Courtney Love photo

“Attachment is the still water in which the mosquitoes of stress grow.”

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 100

Joel Mokyr photo

“Before the Industrial Revolution all techniques in use were supported by very narrow epistemic bases. That is to say, the people who invented them did not have much of a clue as to why and how they worked. The pre-1750 world produced, and produced well. It made many path-breaking inventions. But it was a world of engineering without mechanics, iron-making without metallurgy, farming without soil science, mining without geology, water-power without hydraulics, dye-making without organic chemistry, and medical practice without microbiology and immunology. The main point to keep in mind here is that such a lack of an epistemic base does not necessarily preclude the development of new techniques through trial and error and simple serendipity. But it makes the subsequent wave of micro-inventions that adapt and improve the technique and create the sustained productivity growth much slower and more costly. If one knows why some device works, it becomes easier to manipulate and debug it, to adapt to new uses and changing circumstances. Above all, one knows what will not work and thus reduce the costs of research and experimentation.”

Joel Mokyr (1946) Israeli American economic historian

Joel Mokyr, " The knowledge society: Theoretical and historical underpinnings http://ehealthstrategies.comnehealthstrategies.comnxxx.ehealthstrategies.com/files/unitednations_mokyr.pdf." AdHoc Expert Group on Knowledge Systems, United Nations, NY. 2003.

Vitruvius photo
John Buchan photo
Robert Jordan photo
Maimónides photo
Suzanne Collins photo
Bono photo
Joseph Conrad photo

“Coming in from the eastward, the bright colouring of the [Nore] lightship marking the part of the river committed to the charge of an Admiral (the Commander-in-Chief at the Nore) accentuates the dreariness and the great breadth of the Thames Estuary. But soon the course of the ship opens the entrance of the Medway, with its men-of-war moored in line, and the long wooden jetty of Port Victoria, with its few low buildings like the beginning of a hasty settlement upon a wild and unexplored shore. The famous Thames barges sit in brown clusters upon the water with an effect of birds floating upon a pond… [The inward-bound ships] all converge upon the Nore, the warm speck of red upon the tones of drab and gray, with the distant shores running together towards the west, low and flat, like the sides of an enormous canal. The sea-reach of the Thames is straight, and, once Sheerness is left behind, its banks seem very uninhabited, except for the cluster of houses which is Southend, or here and there a lonely wooden jetty where petroleum ships discharge their dangerous cargoes, and the oil-storage tanks, low and round with slightly-domed roofs, peep over the edge of the fore-shore, as it were a village of Central African huts imitated in iron. Bordered by the black and shining mud-flats, the level marsh extends for miles. Away in the far background the land rises, closing the view with a continuous wooded slope, forming in the distance an interminable rampart overgrown with bushes.”

The Nore to Hope Point
The Mirror of the Sea (1906), On the River Thames, Ch. 16

Johannes Kepler photo
Mos Def photo

“Flow greatest like the greatest lakes / Capes on great estates, quiet water major waves”

Mos Def (1973) American rapper and actor

From "Priority"
Album The Ecstatic

Glen Cook photo

“It is a saying of my people. Even Water sleeps. But Enemy never rests.”

Source: She Is the Darkness (1997), Chapter 79 (p. 554)

Wilfred Thesiger photo
George William Russell photo

“Language, intelligence, and humor, along with art, generosity, and musical ability, are often described as human equivalents of the peacock’s tail. However, peacocks afford a poor analogy for the role of courtship displays in humans. Other animal models offer a better fit. In a number of nonhuman species — species as diverse as sea dragons and grebes — males and females engage in a mutual courtship “dance,” in which the two partners mirror one another’s movements. In Clark’s grebes and Western grebes, for instance, the pair bond ritual culminates in the famous courtship rush: The male and female swim side by side along the top of the water, with their wings back and their heads and necks in a stereotyped posture. If we want a nonhuman analogue for the role of creative intelligence or humor in human courtship, we should think not of ornamented peacocks displaying while drab females evaluate them. We should think instead of grebes engaged in their mating rush or sea dragons engaged in their synchronized mirror dance. Once we have one of these alternative images fixed in our minds, we can then add the proviso that there is a slight skew such that, in the early stages of courtship, men tend to display more vigorously and women tend to be choosier. However, this should be seen as a qualification to the primary message that intelligence, humor, and other forms of sexual display are part of the mutual courtship process in our species.”

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), p. 160

Thomas Noon Talfourd photo
Daniel Handler photo
William Cowper photo
Dejan Stojanovic photo

“To transform a grimace into a sound sounds impossible, yet it is possible to transform a vision into music, to go outside an enslaved personality, to become impersonal by transforming into sand, into water, into light.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

Big Miniature http://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/21376/Big_Miniature
From the poems written in English

Zakir Hussain (politician) photo
Viktor Orbán photo

“Mass migration is like a slow and steady current of water which washes away the shore. It appears in the guise of humanitarian action, but its true nature is the occupation of territory; and their gain in territory is our loss of territory.”

Viktor Orbán (1963) Hungarian politician, chairman of Fidesz

Budapest speech http://www.kormany.hu/en/the-prime-minister/the-prime-minister-s-speeches/speech-by-prime-minister-viktor-orban-on-15-march, 15 March 2016

Rāmabhadrācārya photo

“By the waters of Life we sat together,
Hand in hand, in the golden days
Of the beautiful early summer weather,
When skies were purple and breath was praise.”

Thomas Noel (poet) (1799–1861) English poet

An old Man’s Idyll, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Robert E. Howard photo

“I'm not going to vote. I won't vote for a Catholic and I won't vote for a damned Republican. Maybe I've said that before. My ancestors were all Catholic and not very far back. And I have reason to hate the church.
I feel a curious kinship, though, with the Middle Ages. I have been more successful in selling tales laid in that period of time, than in any other. Truth it was an epoch for strange writers. Witches and werewolves, alchemists and necromancers, haunted the brains of those strange savage people, barbaric children that they were, and the only thing which was never believed was the truth. Those sons of the old pagan tribes were wrought upon by priest and monk, and they brought all their demons from their mythology and accepted all the demons of the new creed also, turning their old gods into devils. The slight knowledge which filtered through the monastaries from the ancient sources of decayed Greece and fallen Rome, was so distorted and perverted that by the time it reached the people, it resembled some monstrous legend. And the vague minded savages further garbed it in heathen garments. Oh, a brave time, by Satan! Any smooth rogue could swindle his way through life, as he can today, but then there was pageantry and high illusion and vanity, and the beloved tinsel of glory without which life is not worth living.
I hate the devotees of great wealth but I enjoy seeing the splendor that wealth can buy. And if I were wealthy, I'd live in a place with marble walls and marble floors, lapis lazulis ceilings and cloth-of-gold and I would have silver fountains in the courts, flinging an everlasting sheen of sparkling water in the air. Soft low music should breathe forever through the rooms and slim tigerish girls should glide through on softly falling feet, serving all the wants of me and my guests; girls with white bare limbs like molten gold and soft dreamy eyes.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

From a letter to Harold Preece (received October 20, 1928)
Letters

Charles Lyell photo
Thiruvalluvar photo
Rumi photo
Kazimir Malevich photo
Pat Conroy photo
Robert Charles Wilson photo
Joni Madraiwiwi photo
Ulysses S. Grant photo
Bono photo
Ramakrishna photo

“A boat may stay in water, but water should not stay in boat. A spiritual aspirant may live in the world, but the world should not live within him.”

Ramakrishna (1836–1886) Indian mystic and religious preacher

Source: Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna (1960), p. 266

James Weldon Johnson photo
Kent Hovind photo
George Herbert photo

“577. Folly growes without watering.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Jacula Prudentum (1651)

Auguste Rodin photo

“The landscape painter, perhaps, goes even further. It is not only in living beings that he sees the reflection of the universal soul; it is in the trees, the bushes, the valleys, the hills. What to other men is only wood and earth appears to the great landscapist like the face of a great being. Corot saw kindness abroad in the trunks of the trees, in the grass of the fields, in the mirroring water of the lakes. But there Millet read suffering and resignation.
Everywhere the great artist hears spirit answer to his spirit. Where, then, can you find a more religious man?
Does not the sculptor perform his act of adoration when he perceives the majestic character of the forms that he studies? — when, from the midst of fleeting lines, he knows how to extricate the eternal type of each being? — when he seems to discern in the very breast of the divinity the immutable models on which all living creatures are moulded? Study, for example, the masterpieces of the Egyptian sculptors, either human or animal figures, and tell me if the accentuation of the essential lines does not produce the effect of a sacred hymn. Every artist who has the gift of generalizing forms, that is to say, of accenting their logic without depriving them of their living reality, provokes the same religious emotion; for he communicates to us the thrill he himself felt before the immortal verities.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Art, 1912, Ch. Mystery in Art

Yukteswar Giri photo
Tom Robbins photo
Paul R. Ehrlich photo

“For those out on the water it provided a bizarre soundtrack to a sight that so many would only be able to describe as “like watching a moving picture.””

Steve Turner (1949) British writer

Source: The Band That Played On (Thomas Nelson, 2011), p. 194

Hugh Walpole photo
Mark Satin photo
Indra Nooyi photo

“There were many times that I felt like a fish out of water, times that I really said to myself, 'do I even fit in.”

Indra Nooyi (1955) Indian-born, naturalized American, business executive

Quoted in How PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi gave up cricket for baseball!, 25 March 2012, 18 December 2013, Economic Times http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-05-25/news/31852241_1_ceo-indra-nooyi-bat-and-ball-sport-david-novak,

Dylan Moran photo
Giovannino Guareschi photo
Francis Thompson photo
William O. Douglas photo
Johannes Grenzfurthner photo
Oliver Goldsmith photo
Scott Pruitt photo
Robert M. Pirsig photo
Plutarch photo

“For water continually dropping will wear hard rocks hollow.”

Moralia, Of the Training of Children

William Vaughn Moody photo
James Jeans photo
Steve Killelea photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“He sung,—the notes at first were low,
Like the whispers of love, or the breathings of woe:
The waters were hushed, and the winds were stay'd,
As he sang his farewell to his Lesbian maid!”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Arion from The London Literary Gazette (23rd November 1822) Fragments in Rhyme IV
The Improvisatrice (1824)

Perry Anderson photo
Paul R. Ehrlich photo
Robert Jordan photo

“When there are fish heads and blood in the water, you don’t need to see the silverpike to know they are there.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Siuan Sanche
(15 October 1991)

“If we are to prove that Fox really struck a jet of living water, we ourselves must tap that same fountain.”

Rufus M. Jones (1863–1948) American writer

As quoted in Living in the Light : Some Quaker Pioneers of the 20th Century Vol. I, (1984) by Leonard Stout Kenworthy, p. 126

Plutarch photo

“Athenodorus says hydrophobia, or water-dread, was first discovered in the time of Asclepiades.”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

Symposiacs, book viii. Question IX
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

James Weldon Johnson photo
Cyril Connolly photo

“Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.”

Part III: La Clé des Chants (p. 91)
The Unquiet Grave (1944)

Amit Chaudhuri photo
Bill Mollison photo
Peter Greenaway photo
Ramakrishna photo
Denise Levertov photo

“Let Ariel learn
a blessing for Caliban
and Caliban drink dew from the lotus
open upon the waters.”

Denise Levertov (1923–1997) Poet

Conversation in Moscow, The Freeing of the Dust

Milo Yiannopoulos photo
George Bernard Shaw photo