Quotes about water (2525 quotes, page 19)

“The still pool of air
under the branch of echo.

The still pool of water
under a frond of stars.

The still pool of your mouth
under a thicket of kisses.”

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director

El remanso del aire
bajo la rama del eco.El remanso del agua
bajo fronda de luceros.El remanso de tu boca
bajo espesura de besos.
" Remansos: Variación http://www.poesia-inter.net/fgls0402.htm" from El Diván del Tamarit (1940)

Star , Kiss

“Coquetry whets the appetite; flirtation depraves it. Coquetry is the thorn that guards the rose—easily trimmed off when once plucked. Flirtation is like the slime on water-plants, making them hard to handle, and when caught, only to be cherished in slimy waters.”

Donald Grant Mitchell book Reveries of a Bachelor

Reveries of a Bachelor, or a Book of the Heart (1850), p. 78.

“[taking a vacation with his family in Costa Rica]
I go "what is it?" And she goes "we're going on a shark feeding frenzy!" Okay, wait… we're in a boat looking down in the water? "No, that's the best part! We're in the water with the sharks!"”

Bill Engvall (1957) American comedian and actor

And I go "have you lost your mind???"
Aged and Confused (2009)

Family , Waiting , Parting

“At the beginning of the 21st century peace has become pivotal to the survival of society as we know it. The major challenges facing humanity today are global – climate change, lack of fresh water, ever-decreasing biodiversity and over-population. It is hard to over-state the devastating effects that these problems will have on business unless global actions are taken that have the agreement of most nations. No nations or individuals will be untouched.”

Steve Killelea (1949) Australian businessman

The Study of Industries that Prosper in Peace – the ‘Peace Industry’ http://www.visionofhumanity.org/images/content/Documents/2008%20GPi%20Discussion%20Paper.pdf (2008)

Peace , Business , Problem , Change

“Duly twice a morning
Would I be sprinkling it with fountain-water.
At last it grew, and grew, and bore, and bore,
Till at the length
It grew a gallows, and did bear our son,
It bore thy fruit and mine: O wicked, wicked plant.”

Thomas Kyd (1558–1594) English dramatist

Act III, sc. xiia
Misattributed

“On the surface of the water, a midge vanishes into a hungry ripple. I'm not ready yet. He wonders why, at his age and having come so far, he still feels that. The culmination of his luck is that he will never feel any other way.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

Source: Memoirs, May Week Was in June (1990), p. 240

Age , Way , Feeling

“Work at the same time upon water, sky, branches, ground, keeping everything going on an equal basis and unceasingly rework until you have got it. Paint generously and unhesitatingly, for it is best not to lose the first impression.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

his remark in 1896, as quoted in: Paul Cézanne, ‎Terence Maloon, ‎Angela Gundert (1998) Classic Cézanne, p. 45
1890's

Time , Painting

“The times in his studio when he washed his hands and they smoked, for his hands were so warm and the water so cold.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939)
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Time

“You're the son of your father,
Try a little bit harder.
Do for me as he would do for you.
With blood and water bricks and mortar,
He built for you a home.
You're the son of your father,
So treat me as your own.”

Elton John (1947) English rock singer-songwriter, composer and pianist

Son of Your Father
Song lyrics, Tumbleweed Connection (1970)

Home

“The people of your world became so stupid and rude that my companions and I no longer enjoyed teaching them. You must surely have heard of us: we were called oracles, nymphs, spirits, fairies, household gods, lemures, larvas, lamias, sprites, water-nymphs, incubi, shades, spirits of the dead, specters and ghosts.”

Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) French novelist, dramatist, scientist and duelist

Sun-being to Cyrano
The Other World (1657)

God , People , Stupidity , World

“With a tongue like a razor he will kiss
the mother, the child,
and we three will color the stars black
in memory of his mother
who kept him chained to the food tree
or turned him on and off like a water faucet
and made women through all these hazy years
the enemy with a heart of lies.”

Anne Sexton book The Book of Folly

"The Wifebeater"
The Book of Folly (1972)

Women , Food , Color , Star

“To fish in troubled waters.”

Matthew Henry (1662–1714) Theologician from Wales

Psalm 60.
Commentaries

Fish

“Salman ibn 'Amir reported that the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said, "When one of you breaks the fast, he should break it with dates. They are a blessing. If he cannot find any dates, then water. It is pure." He said, "Sadaqa given to a poor person is sadaqa but to a relative it is both sadaqa and maintaining ties of kinship."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Riyadh-as-Saliheen by Imam Al-Nawawi, volume 3, hadith number 332
Sunni Hadith

Peace , Personality

“Very well, the starting point would be that claim of Professor Quarrey’s, which had been in the news at the beginning of the year, that the country’s greatest export was noxious gas. And who would like to stir up the fuss again? Obviously, the Canadians, cramped into a narrow band to the north of their more powerful neighbors, growing daily angrier about the dirt that drifted to them on the wind, spoiling crops, causing chest diseases and soiling laundry hung out to dry. So she’d called the magazine Hemisphere in Toronto, and the editor had immediately offered ten thousand dollars for three articles.
Very conscious that all calls out of the country were apt to be monitored, she’d put the proposition to him in highly general terms: the risk of the Baltic going the same way as the Mediterranean, the danger of further dust-bowl like the Mekong Desert, the effects of bringing about climactic change. That was back in the news—the Russians had revised their plan to reverse the Yenisei and Ob. Moreover, there was the Danube problem, worse than the Rhine had ever been, and Welsh nationalists were sabotaging pipelines meant to carry “their” water into England, and the border war in West Pakistan had been dragging on so long most people seemed to have forgotten that it concerned a river.
And so on.
Almost as soon as she started digging, though, she thought she might never be able to stop. It was out of the question to cover the entire planet. Her pledged total of twelve thousand words would be exhausted by North American material alone.”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

June “A PLACE TO STAND”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

War , People , Disease , Way

“Up in box five I blinked in surprised amusement. That was a new one! Little Giry should be writing Gothic novels, not prancing around the stage dressed as a water nymph!”

Susan Kay Phantom

Erik (p. 380)
Phantom (1990)

Box

“When I was a young subaltern in the South African War, the water was not fit to drink. To make it palatable we had to put a bit of whiskey in it. By diligent effort I learned to like it.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Aboard the Presidential train during the journey to Fulton, Missouri (March 4, 1946); quoted in Conflict and Crisis by Robert Donovan, University of Missouri Press (1996), p. 190 ISBN 082621066X
Post-war years (1945–1955)

War , Drink , Effort , Learning

“Dancing with the wind: the fire burns, the water drowns.”

Travis Meeks (1979) American musician

Dancing with the wind (Red - 2003).
Lyrics

Dance

“All of our conscious states, without exception, are caused by lower level neurobiological processes in the brain, and they are realized in the brain as higher level, or system features. It's about as mysterious as the liquidity of water, right? The liquidity is not an extra juice squirted out by the H2O molecules, it's a condition that the system is in; and just as the jar full of water can go from a liquid to solid, depending on the behavior of the molecules, so your brain can go from a state of being conscious to a state of being unconscious, depending on the behavior of the molecules. The famous mind body problem is that simple.”

John Rogers Searle (1932) American philosopher

"Our shared condition — consciousness" (May, 2013)

Behavior , Problem , Dependency

“The conscious water saw its God and blushed.”

Richard Crashaw (1612–1649) British writer

Epigrammatum sacrorum liber (1634). Translated by John Dryden from Crashaw's Latin original: "Nympha pudica Deum vidit, et erubuit (The modest Nymph saw the god, and blushed)", Complete works of Richard Crashaw (1872), edited by Alexander B. Grosart, vol. 2, p. 96.

God

“And here, facing this supreme religious sacrifice, we reach the summit of the tragedy, the very heart of it — the sacrifice of our own individual consciousness upon the alter of the perfected Human Consciousness, of the Divine Consciousness. But is there really a tragedy? …if we could succeed in understanding and feeling that we were going to enrich Christ, should we hesitate for a moment in surrendering ourselves to Him? Would the stream that flows into the sea, and feels in the freshness of its waters the bitterness of the salt of the ocean, wish to flow back to its source? would it wish to return to the cloud which drew it life from the sea? is it not joy to feel itself absorbed?”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), X : Religion, the Mythology of the Beyond and the Apocatastasis

Life , Feeling , Understanding , Heart

“I mean it was bad enough when we had these people called the birthers who thought he was not born here. … But I was saying last night that I've identified this new group and I'm calling them the churchers. …The churchers. They're the people who don't think that he is a Christian. They think he's — he's a secret Muslim, Larry. I guess you haven't been paying enough attention. … When I talked to him, he told me about his plan to use drinking water to sterilize white people. I get — whoops, I've said too much.”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

Larry King Live interview (2010)

People , Secret , Drink , Thinking

“Ah lady! ah lady! hear a word,
At length having seen (him) I have come again;
Looking, looking, (my) pain increased,
Whatever was done profited not.
He binds not his hair, he girds not his waist,
He eats not food, he drinks not water.
The colour of gold Š yâm has become,
Constantly remembering thy name.
He does not recognize any one, his eye does not wink,
He remains with fixed look like a doll of wood.
I placed a piece of wool to his nose,
Then only I perceived that he breathed,
There is breath, but there remains no life,
Delay not, my happiness depends on it!
Cha. n. dî Dâs saith (it is) the anguish of separation
In his heart, the only medicine is Radha.”

Chandidas

THE EARLY VAISHNAVA POETS OF BENGAL: II. CHA.N.DÎ DÂS http://www.sacred-texts.com/journals/ia/evp2.htm By JOHN BEAMES, B.C.S., M.R.A.S., &c.

Life , Pain , Food , Drink

“I am standing up at the water's edge in my dream
I cannot make a single sound as you scream.
It can't be that cold, the ground is still warm to touch.
This place is so quiet, sensing that storm.”

Peter Gabriel (1950) English singer-songwriter, record producer and humanitarian

Red Rain
Song lyrics, So (1986)

Dreams , Sense

“O ye who are invested with the Bayán! Regard not yourselves as being like unto the people to whom the Qur’án or the Gospel or other Scriptures of old were given, since at the time of His manifestation ye shall stray farther from God than did they. If ye happen to shut yourselves out it would never cross your minds that ye were shut out from Him. It behooveth you to consider how the people unto whom the Qur’án was given were debarred from the Truth, for indeed ye will act in a like manner, thinking that ye are doers of good. If ye perceive the degree of your deprivation of God, ye will wish to have perished from the face of the earth and to have sunk into oblivion. The day will come when ye will earnestly desire to know that which would meet with the good-pleasure of God but, alas, ye shall find no path unto Him. Ye, even as camels that wander aimlessly, will not find a pasture wherein ye may gather and unite upon a Cause in which ye can assuredly believe. At that time God shall cause the Sun of Truth to shine forth and the oceans of His bounty and grace to surge, while ye will have chosen droplets of water as the object of your desire, and will have deprived yourselves of the plenteous waters in His oceans.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

XVI, 13
The Kitáb-I-Asmá

God , People , Pleasure , Truth

“Bush, and Blair, and the prime minister of Japan, and Berlusconi, these people are criminals, and they are responsible for mass murder in the world, for the war, and for the occupation, through their support for Israel, and through their support for a globalized capitalist economic system, which is the biggest killer the world has ever known. It has killed far more people than Adolf Hitler. It has killed far more people than George Bush. The economic system which these people support, which leaves most of the people in the world hungry, and without clean water to drink. So we're going to put them on trial, the leaders, when they come. They think they're coming for a holiday in a beautiful country called Scotland; in fact, they're coming to their trial.”

George Galloway (1954) British politician, broadcaster, and writer

Interview on Abu Dhabi TV http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sd&ID=SP91805, June 1, 2005

War , People , World , Beauty

“Taking on water
Sailing a restless sea
From a memory
A fantasy
The wind carries into white water
Far from the islands
Don't you know…
You're never going to get to France
Mary, queen of chance, will they find you!
Never going to get to France…
Could a new romance ever bind you?”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Discovery (1984)

Memory , Chance , Sea

“Outside in the garden, the greenhouse collapses. Masonry crashes from the roof and splashes into the moat. The grave-marker for the pig Hortense moves up out of the ground. The Maillol statue stands firm as the shrubs around it quiver. A water-main bursts in the yard sending a shower into the air. Trees fall as though whipped down to the ground. The water on the lake shimmers and ripples like a film run backwards.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Penultimate paragraph of the published script.
8 1/2 Women

Tree

“Waterborne diseases kill millions every year, over 1.3 billion people have no clean water. ICROSS has provided safe drinking water to over 300 000 people through innovative ground breaking research spanning three decades”

Michael Elmore-Meegan (1959) British humanitarian

ICROSS Annual Report 2015

People , Disease , Drink

“The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly. A first knowledge of their sense of the purity of rarefaction was given me in early years, when we had ridden far out over the rolling plains of North Syria to a ruin of the Roman period which the Arabs believed was made by a prince of the border as a desert-palace for his queen. The clay of its building was said to have been kneaded for greater richness, not with water, but with the precious essential oils of flowers. My guides, sniffing the air like dogs, led me from crumbling room to room, saying, 'This is jessamine, this violet, this rose'. But at last Dahoum drew me: 'Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all', and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past. That slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass, to its first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. About them it seemed to fret and linger, murmuring in baby-speech. 'This,' they told me, 'is the best: it has no taste.”

T. E. Lawrence book Seven Pillars of Wisdom

My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries to choose the things in which mankind had had no share or part.
Source: Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922), Ch. 3

World , Dogs , Way , Flowers

“One can do such lovely things with so little. Subjects that are too beautiful end by appearing theatrical – take Switzerland, for example. Think of all the beautiful little things Corot did at Gisors; two willows, a little water, a bridge, like the picture in the Universal Exhibition. What a masterpiece!... Everything is beautiful, all that matters is to be able to interpret.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

In a letter to his son Lucien, 26 July 1892, as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock - , Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 146
Quote of Pissarro, referring to a willow-painting of his former art-teacher Camille Corot
1890's

Love , Beauty , Thinking , Universe

“It is true that we were cautious in our planning. There were many uncertainties about how well our Lunar module systems and our Pressure suit and backpack would match the engineering predictions in the hostile lunar environment. We were operating in a near perfect vacuum with the temperature well above 200 degrees Fahrenheit with the local gravity only one sixth that of Earth. That combination cannot be duplicated here on Earth, but we tried as best we could to test our equipment for those conditions. For example, because normal air conditioning is inadequate for lunar conditions, we were required to use cold water to cool the interior of our suits. We did not have any data to tell us how long the small water tank in our backpacks would suffice. NASA officials limited our surface working time to 2 and 3/4 hours on that first surface exploration to assure that we would not expire of hyperthermia.”

Neil Armstrong (1930–2012) American astronaut; first person to walk on the moon

Letter to Robert Krulwich (2010)

Hostility , Time , Perfection

“I spill water on myself all the time at nice restaurants. I've run into poles and knocked myself out.”

Kristin Kreuk (1982) Canadian actress

Teen People's "25 Hottest Stars Under 25" in 2002 http://web.archive.org/web/20060324131358/http://www.teenpeople.com/teenpeople/2002/25hottest/profile/profile_kreuk.html

Time

“More than a billion people lack adequate access to clean water.”

David Suzuki (1936) Canadian popular scientist and environmental activist

People

“Science views the blood-building and character-influencing ur-organism "water" merely as a chemical compound and provides millions of people with a liquid prepared from this point of view, which is everything but healthy water.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Callum Coats: Water Wizard

People , Science

“That old standby of melodrama, the rich uncle shoved into the bin so the greedy relatives could get their hands on his estate, had a sound basis in fact. The Victorians cleaned up the straw and the chains of the old Bedlam-like institutions of the eighteenth century, but they didn't always clean up the practices. Patients were drugged, starved, drained of vast quantities of blood, beaten up, swung from ropes, immersed in cold water and whirled around in the air upside-down, all in the belief that it would improve their mental states. Ask yourself whether this is likely to have been true.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Ophelia Has a Lot to Answer For (1997)

“In what manner that power can be applied to draw water or ore from mines, to discharge iron bullets to a great distance, to propel ships against the wind, and to a multitude of other similar purposes, it would be too long here to detail; but each individual, according to the particular occasion, must select the construction of machinery appropriate to his purpose.”

Denis Papin (1647–1713) French physicist, mathematician and inventor

"A New Method of Obtaining Very Great Moving Powers at Small Cost" (1690)

Drawing

“Can it be the sun descending o'er the level plain of water or the Red Swan floating, flying wounded by the Magic Arrow? Staining all the waves with crimson, with the crimson of its life-blood, filling all the air with splendor, filling all the air with plumage? […] O'er it the Star of Evening melts and trembles through the purple, hangs suspensed in twilight, walks in silence through the heavens…”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Incantations (1978)

Life , Star , Silence , Sun

“If the formula for water is H2O, is the formula for an ice cube H2O squared?”

Lily Tomlin (1939) American actress, comedian, writer, and producer

Contributions of Jane Wagner

“While in Campania the burning of the earth makes ashes, in Tuscany the combustion of the stone makes carbuncular sand. Both are excellent in walls but one is better to use for buildings on land, the other for piers under salt water.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter VI, Sec. 6

“She laughed and began undressing. She was brown underneath, but it was natural brown and not a tan. I was white and ghostlike. There was a blob of heaviness at my stomach. I pulled it in to hide it. She looked at the whiteness, at my loins and legs, and smiled. I was glad when she walked toward the water.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

Smile , Nature

“[G]iven our inability over the past two decades to deal with an unbreakable chain of unemployment, debt, inflation and no real growth, we have drifted farther and farther out into a cold, unfriendly, confusing sea. The new certitude of those in positions of authority — those out of the water — is that the certain answer is to cut away the life preservers.”

John Ralston Saul book The Unconscious Civilization

The Unconscious Civilization (1995)

Life , Past , Sea

“If the formula for water is H2O, is the formula for an ice cube H2O squared?”

Jane Wagner (1935) Playwright, actress

Other material for Lily Tomlin

“Fhairshon had a son,
Who married Noah's daughter,
And nearly spoiled ta Flood,
By drinking up the water.

Which he would have done,
I at least pelieve it,
Had the mixture been
Only half Glenlivet.”

William Edmondstoune Aytoun (1813–1865) British writer and lawyer

Poem, The Massacre of the Macpherson

Drink , Daughters

“And I'm going on in believing in Him. You'd better know Him, and know His name, and know how to call His name. You may not know philosophy. You may not be able to say with Alfred North Whitehead that He's the Principle of Concretion. You may not be able to say with Hegel and Spinoza that He is the Absolute Whole. You may not be able to say with Plato that He's the Architectonic Good. You may not be able to say with Aristotle that He's the Unmoved Mover. But sometimes you can get poetic about it if you know Him. You begin to know that our brothers and sisters in distant days were right. Because they did know Him as a rock in a weary land, as a shelter in the time of starving, as my water when I'm thirsty, and then my bread in a starving land. And then if you can't even say that, sometimes you may have to say, "He's my everything. He's my sister and my brother. He's my mother and my father." If you believe it and know it, you never need walk in darkness. Don't be a fool. Recognize your dependence on God. As the days become dark and the nights become dreary, realize that there is a God who rules above. And so I’m not worried about tomorrow. I get weary every now and then. The future looks difficult and dim, but I’m not worried about it ultimately because I have faith in God.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Why Jesus Called A Man A Fool (1967)

God , Faith , Fools , Sister

“That was the evil of Dr. Bertram Waters: the perpetuation of hopeless dreams, compounded by the betrayal of those dreams to make his own a reality.”

George Alec Effinger (1947–2002) Novelist, short story writer

Source: Death in Florence (1978), Chapter 2 “A New Mann” (p. 99).

Dreams , Reality , Evil , Betrayal

“O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.”

W. H. Auden (1907–1973) Anglo-American poet

As I Walked Out One Evening (1937)

Tea , Dead

“He could not swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath seemed to buoy him up. Some halt in the way of things seems to work here. See him. You could say that he is sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their blood in history and will have it. But they want this man's life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns and cries of execration. How then is he borne up? Or rather, why will not these waters take him?”

Cormac McCarthy book Child of God

Source: Child of God (1973), p.147

Life , Men , People , Way

“I made it from just three lines in less than a minute. It was the first of the series [Water lily drawings, Kelly made in 1968; he admired the Waterlilies paintings of Monet that got the weight right. My eye followed my hand. Then I did all the others, but this was the best.”

Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) American painter, sculptor, and printmaker

Source: 1969 - 1980, In: "Ellsworth Kelly: Works on Paper," 1987, p. 26 : 'Notes from 1969'

Drawing , Painting

“Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

On Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, in the House of Commons, November 5, 1919 as cited in Churchill by Himself (2008), Ed. Langworth, PublicAffairs, p. 355 ISBN 1586486381
Early career years (1898–1929)

Way

“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”

Tony Hayward (1957) British businessman

BP boss admits job on the line over Gulf oil spill http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/may/13/bp-boss-admits-mistakes-gulf-oil-spill.

“We may find illustrations of the highest doctrines of science in games and gymnastics, in travelling by land and by water, in storms of the air and of the sea, and wherever there is matter in motion.”

James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) Scottish physicist

Introductory Lecture on Experimental Physics held at Cambridge in October 1871, re-edited by W. D. Niven (2003) in Volume 2 of The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, Courier Dover Publications, p. 243.

Travel , Game , Science , Sea

““This isn’t just consulting work, Haig. It means going into politics.”
“So?”
“What do I need it for?”
“Nobody needs anything except a little food and water now and then. The rest is preferences.””

Robert Silverberg book The Stochastic Man

Source: The Stochastic Man (1975), Chapter 8 (p. 33)

Food

“Call things by their right names… Glass of brandy and water! That is the current but not the appropriate name: ask for a glass of liquid fire and distilled damnation.”

Robert Hall (1764–1831) British Baptist pastor

Gregory's Life of Hall, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: "He calls drunkenness an expression identical with ruin", Diogenes Laërtius, Pythagoras, vi. "A drunkard clasp his teeth and not undo 'em, To suffer wet damnation to run through 'em", Cyril Tourneur, The Revenger’s Tragedy, Act iii, Scene 1.

“Privatization is a neoliberal and imperialist plan. Health can’t be privatized because it is a fundamental human right, nor can education, water, electricity and other public services. They can’t be surrendered to private capital that denies the people from their rights.”

Hugo Chávez (1954–2013) 48th President of Venezuela

Hugo Chávez during his closing speech at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. January 31, 2005. http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news.php?newsno=1486
2005

People , Health , Education

“You can't rearrange freshly fallen snow, you can't fix snow so it looks untouched. You can rework earth, and sand and even grass if you try hard enough. Water takes care of itself, because it swallows everything and flows back together once it's done swallowing. And air is always in place because you can't see it. Everything but snow would have kept quiet.”

Herta Müller book The Hunger Angel

Source: The Hunger Angel (2012), p. 11

Grass

“Many Frenchmen see their society as drifting in uncertain waters without an anchor. They are concerned by increasingly powerless elected governments, distant bureaucrats who intervene in every aspect of people’s lives, and an economic system that promises much but delivers little. The advocates of Western decline claim that Europeans no longer believe in anything and are thus doomed to lose the fight against homegrown Islamists who passionately believe in the little they know of Islam. A note of comedy is injected into this tragedy by people like President Hollande who keep repeating that the terror attacks had “nothing to do with Islam.” Is Hollande an authority on what is and what is not Islam? Talking heads repeat ad nauseam that France is not at war against Islam. OK. However, part of Islam is certainly at war against France, and the rest of the civilized world, including a majority of Muslims across the globe. One’s enemy is not whom one wants him to be but whom he wants to be. The Charlie killers saw themselves as jihadis, and it is only in seeing them as such that one could start dealing with them in an effective way. In designating them as Islamists, one is not “at war against Islam.” Millions of French are expected to take part in marches across the country today to pay respect to the 17 people, including 10 journalists, who were killed in the attacks. There is going to be just one slogan: “We are all Charlie.” Do they believe it? The French would do well to remember that, once all is said and done, they still live in one of the few countries in the world where they can think and say what they like, a state of bliss a majority of Muslims across the globe could only dream of. And, the prophets of decline notwithstanding, that is something worth living and fighting for.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

What happens to Western values if no one stands up against Islam? http://nypost.com/2015/01/11/what-happens-to-western-values-if-no-one-stands-up-against-islam/, New York Post (January 11, 2015).
New York Post

War , People , World , Dreams

“I frequently counsel people who are getting frustrated about an edit war to think about someone who lives without clean drinking water, without any proper means of education, and how our work might someday help that person. It puts flamewars into some perspective, I think.”

Jimmy Wales (1966) Wikipedia co-founder and American Internet entrepreneur

As quoted in "Wikimedia Founder Jimmy Wales Responds," by Robin "Roblimo" Miller, Slashdot (28 July 2004)

War , People , Education , Drink

“Then with a glad cheer our Lord looked unto His Side and beheld, rejoicing. With His sweet looking He led forth the understanding of His creature by the same wound into His Side within. And then he shewed a fair, delectable place, and large enough for all mankind that shall be saved to rest in peace and in love. And therewith He brought to mind His dearworthy blood and precious water which he let pour all out for love. And with the sweet beholding He shewed His blessed heart even cloven in two.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Tenth Revelation, Chapter 24

Love , Peace , Understanding , Heart

“Ignorance and error are necessary to life, like bread and water.”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

L'ignorance et l'erreur sont nécessaires à la vie comme le pain et l'eau.
Pierre Nozière http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Pierre_Nozi%C3%A8re_-_Livre_deuxi%C3%A8me._Notes_%C3%A9crites_par_Pierre_Noziere_en_marge_de_son_gros_Plutarque. (1899), book II: Notes écrites par Pierre Nozière en marge de son gros Plutarque

Life , Error

“It is a strange paradox: Humans drown in the water, fish drown in the land.”

Javad Alizadeh (1953) cartoonist, journalist and humorist

Quoted in Humor & Caricature (July 1995), p. 3

Fish

“English as tuppence, changing yet changeless as canal-water, nestling in green nowhere, armoured and effete, bold flag-bearer, lotus fed Miss Havishambling, opsimath and eremite, feudal-still reactionary Rawlinson End. The story so far.”

Vivian Stanshall (1943–1995) English musician, artist and author

Dot dot dot.
opening of side 1
Sir Henry at Rawlinson End (1978)

Change

“Digital files cannot be made uncopyable, any more than water can be made not wet.”

Bruce Schneier (1963) American computer scientist

The Futility of Digital Copy Prevention, Schneier, Bruce, 2001-05-15, Cryptogram newsletter, 2006-09-08 http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0105.html#3,
Digital Rights Management

“Identify an agrarian problem—greenhouse gas emissions, overuse of antibiotics and dangerous pesticides, genetically modified crops, salmonella, E. coli, waste disposal, excessive use of water—and trace it to its ultimate origin and you will likely find an animal. … Research shows that veganism, which obviates the inherent waste involved in growing the grains used to fatten animals for food in conventional systems, is seven times more energy efficient than eating meat and, if embraced globally, could reduce greenhouse gas emissions from conventional agriculture by 94 percent. … But with rare exception, those in the big, lumpy tent have thrown down a red carpet for “ethical butchers” while generally dismissing animal rights advocates as smug ascetics (which they can be) and crazed activists (ditto) who are driven more by sappy sentiment than rock-ribbed reason. It’s an easy move to make. But the problem with this dismissal—and the overall refusal to address the ethics of killing animals for food—is that it potentially anchors the Food Movement’s admirable goals in the shifting sands of an unresolved hypocrisy. Let’s call it the “omnivore’s contradiction.””

James E. McWilliams (1968) American historian

"Loving Animals to Death: How Can We Raise Them Humanely and Then Butcher Them?", in The American Scholar (Spring 2014) https://theamericanscholar.org/loving-animals-to-death/.

Food , Problem , Time , Animals

“There was strong warrant for pretensions… As far back as 1493, Pope Alexander VI had settled disputes between Spain and Portugal arising out of their rivalry in the Orient and the Occident by drawing a line from pole to pole one hundred leagues west of the Azores, giving all west of it to the Spanish, all east of it to the Portuguese. Both these nations attempted more or less persistently to exercise the sway thus given over the oceans as well as over the continent. The Portuguese forbade under heavy penalties any person, whether native or alien, to pass through the waters off the African and Brazilian coasts without special permission; the Spanish were hardly less severe toward those who without leave approached their dependencies. But, though the realization of the earth's rotundity renewed the old difficulty, and Spain and Portugal discovered that the Papal decision was futile, since all their new dominions could be approached both from the east and the west, both nations continued to maintain, as best they could, their sovereignty over the vast oceans. Other nations followed these examples.”

Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) American politician

Source: Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (1915), p. 60-61

Penalty , Exercises , Decision , Strong

“But o'er CYRENE'S cheek the rose,
Like moon-touch'd water, ebbs and flows;
And eyes that droop like Summer flowers
Told they could change with shine and showers.”

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

The Lost Pleiad
Source: The Venetian Bracelet (1829)

Flowers , Change , Summer

“Slowly, but with no doubt or hesitation whatever, and in something of a solemn expectancy, the two animals passed through the broken tumultuous water and moored their boat at the flowery margin of the island.”

Kenneth Grahame book The Wind in the Willows

Source: The Wind in the Willows (1908), Ch. 7

Animals

“[Churchill's wartime menus] show him slurping bottles of whisky, champagne [and] brandy with every sumptuous meal, while the underclass fought and starved for the privilege of poverty and unemployment. Thankfully, the Germans bombed Glasgow back to full employment. Even in the 1960s Earl Mountbatten was prosecuted for adding water to the milk on his farm so you can imagine how the landed gentry 'rationed' themselves during the war.”

Ian Brady (1938–2017) British serial killer, perpetrator of the Moors murders

As quoted by Jean Rafferty in "My friend Ian Brady" http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/crime-courts/my-friend-ian-brady.18076533, Scotland Herald (8 July 2012)

War , Imagination

“Let me say again that I am not impugning the motives of the men in Wall Street. They may think that that is the best way to create prosperity for the country. When you have got the market in your hand, does honesty oblige you to turn the palm upside down and empty it? If you have got the market in your hand and believe that you understand the interest of the country better than anybody else, is it patriotic to let it go? I can imagine them using this argument to themselves.
The dominating danger in this land is not the existence of great individual combinations, — that is dangerous enough in all conscience, — but the combination of the combinations, — of the railways, the manufacturing enterprises, the great mining projects, the great enterprises for the development of the natural water-powers of the country, threaded together in the personnel of a series of boards of directors into a "community of interest" more formidable than any conceivable single combination that dare appear in the open.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

Section VIII: “Monopoly, Or Opportunity?”, p. 186 http://books.google.com/books?id=MW8SAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA186&dq=%22Let+me+say+again%22
1910s, The New Freedom (1913)

Men , Way , Imagination , Communication

“"Why don't we change our clothes and watch TV or something over at your house?" He felt like hugging her. "I'll make us some coffee," he said joyfully. "Yuk," she said smiling and began to run for the old Perkins place, that beautiful, graceful run of hers that neither mud nor water could defeat.”

Katherine Paterson book Bridge to Terabithia

Jesse Aarons and Leslie Burke (the last time they see each other)
Bridge to Terabithia (1977)

Smile , Beauty , Coffee , Change

“Nature is always lovely, invincible, glad, whatever is done and suffered by her creatures. All scars she heals, whether in rocks or water or sky or hearts.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

24 March 1895, page 337
John of the Mountains, 1938

Love , Nature , Suffering , Heart

“Good-bye to the game all the spoils, the adrenaline rush
Your blood boils, you in a spot knowin' cops could rush
you in the drop, you so easy to touch
No two days are alike, except the 1st and 15th pretty much
And trust, is a word you seldom hear from us
Hustlers, we don't sleep, we rest one eye up
And a drought could define a man when the well dries up
You learn the worth of water
Without work you thirst 'til you die, yup!”

Jay-Z (1969) American rapper, businessman, entrepreneur, record executive, songwriter, record producer and investor

December 4th
The Black Album (2003)

Game , Sleep , Learning

“Only within the 20th Century has biological thought been focused on ecology, or the relation of the living creature to its environment. Awareness of ecological relationships is — or should be — the basis of modern conservation programs, for it is useless to attempt to preserve a living species unless the kind of land or water it requires is also preserved. So delicately interwoven are the relationships that when we disturb one thread of the community fabric we alter it all — perhaps almost imperceptibly, perhaps so drastically that destruction follows.”

Rachel Carson (1907–1964) American marine biologist and conservationist

"Essay on the Biological Sciences" in Good Reading (1958)

Communication

“Anita, I have just come the comforting conclusion that I'll have to paint acres and acres of water color landscapes before I will look for even a passably fair one. After about ten attempts — I certainly have to laugh at myself — It's like feeling around in the dark — thought I knew what I was going to try to do but I find I don't — and guess I'll only find out by slaving away at it. I feel — like a wreck — Have been working like mad all day — and you know how deliciously disgusted with every thing one can be — when the sun begins to go down — and one has been working ones head off all day. It gives me the sensation I used to have when I was a youngster and was going away from home on the train — It is a very special sort of sick feeling.”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

New York City (February 1916), p. 145
1910s, Letters to Anita Pollitzer' (1916)

Color , Feeling , Home , Sun

“I have only [written the Water Margin] to fill up my spare time, and give pleasure to myself; […] I have written it so that the uneducated can read it as well as the educated […]. Alas! Life is so short that I shall not even know what the reader thinks about it, but still I shall be satisfied if a few of my friends will read it and be interested. Also I do not know what I may think of it in my future life after death, because then I may not able to even read it. So why think anything further about it?”

Shi Nai'an (1296–1372) Chinese writer

Variant translation by Pearl S. Buck: "Alas, I was born to die! How can I know what those who come after me and read my book will think of it? I cannot even know what I myself, born into another incarnation, will think of it. I do not even know if I myself afterwards can even read this book. Why therefore should I care?" (All Men are Brothers, 1933; p. xiii)
Preface to Water Margin

Life , Death , Pleasure , Education

“Well may storm be on the sky,
And the waters roll on high,
When MANMADIN passes by.
Earth below and heaven above
Well may bend to thee, oh Love!”

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

Manmadin, The Indian Cupid. Floating down the Ganges from The London Literary Gazette (14th December 1822) Fragments in Rhyme VII
The Improvisatrice (1824)

Love

“Next I must tell about the machine of Ctesibius, which raises water to a height.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book X, Chapter VII, Sec. 1

“I picked up a newspaper today and I couldn't believe it. I read eight headlines that talked about chaos, violence, unrest. And it just was Henny Penny -- "The sky is falling." I've never seen anything like it! And here is a country that's being liberated, here are people who are going from being repressed and held under the thumb of a vicious dictator, and they're free. And all this newspaper could do, with eight or 10 headlines, they showed a man bleeding, a civilian, who they claimed we had shot —one thing after another.
From the very beginning, we were convinced that we would succeed, and that means that that regime would end. And we were convinced that as we went from the end of that regime to something other than that regime, there would be a period of transition. And, you cannot do everything instantaneously; it's never been done, everything instantaneously. We did, however, recognize that there was at least a chance of catastrophic success, if you will, to reverse the phrase, that you could in a given place or places have a victory that occurred well before reasonable people might have expected it, and that we needed to be ready for that; we needed to be ready with medicine, with food, with water. And, we have been.
Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that's what's going to happen here.”

Donald Rumsfeld (1932) U.S. Secretary of Defense

DOD news briefing following the fall of Baghdad (11 April 2003) http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030411-secdef0090.html

People , Food , Freedom , Chance

“Such grief might make the mountain stoop, reverse the waters where they flow, but cannot burst these ponderous bolts that block us from the prison cells crowded with mortal woe…”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Requiem; 1935-1940 (1963; 1987), Instead of a Preface

Mountain

“I never imagined that the Free Software Movement would spawn a watered-down alternative, the Open Source Movement, which would become so well-known that people would ask me questions about "open source" thinking that I work under that banner.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

2000s, Thus Spake Stallman (2000)

People , Imagination , Question , Thinking

“Who consciously throws himself into the water or onto the knife?”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky book The Idiot

The Idiot (1868–9)

“LSD reveals the whatness of things, their quiddity, their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you, the carpetness of carpets, the woodness of wood, the yellowness of yellow, the fingernailness of fingernails, the allness of all, the nothingness of all, the allness of nothing. For me music gives access to every one of these essences of existence, but at a fraction of the social or financial cost of a drug and without the need to cry 'Wow!”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

all the time, which is one of LSD's most distressing and least endearing side-effects.
1990s, Moab is My Washpot (autobiography, 1997)

Music , Time , Cry

“When it comes to getting away, big pits are a handicap. A quarter-pound seed isn't going to be blown about by anything less than a hurricane, and in water an avocado pit sinks.”

Roger Swain (1949) American television personality

p. 11 https://books.google.com/books?id=UutGAAAAYAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=handicap
Field Days: Journal of an Itinerant Biologist (1983)

“Through the constant revolution of the fifth element, with all contained therein, the four elements are forced to move and to change their respective positions, so that fire and air are driven into the water, and again these three elements enter the depth of the earth. Thus are the elements mixed together; and when they return to their respective places, parts of the earth, in quitting their places, move together with the water, the air and the fire. In this whole process the elements act and react upon each other. The elements intermixed, are then combined, and form at first various kinds of vapours; afterwards the several kinds of minerals, every species of plants, and many species of living beings, according to the relative proportion of the constituent parts. All transient beings have their origin in the elements, into which again they resolve when their existence comes to an end. The elements themselves are subject to being transformed from one into another; for although one substance is common to all, substance without form is in reality impossible, just as the physical form of these transient beings cannot exist without substance.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part I, pp.294-295 (1881) Tr. Friedlander

Reality , Change , Parting

“Down swept the gathered waters over rocks
Which broke at times the column's foaming line;
Darkening amid the snow-white froth, it swept
Like an all conquering army, and an arch
Of sparkling hues that in the sunbeams played
Seemed to unite it with the sky which hung
Above all calmness and repose :”

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

(16th February 1822) Poetic Sketches, No.6
The London Literary Gazette, 1821-1822

Time

“The gutters in the lane overflowed with an odd, languid grace. Water filled the lane; rose from ankle-deep to knee-deep. Insects swam in circles. Urchins splashed about haphazardly, while Saraswati returned from market with a shopping-bag in her hands; insects swam away to avoid this clumsy giant. Her wet footprints printing the floor of the house were as rich with possibility as the first footprint Crusoe found on his island.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

A Strange and Sublime Address (1991)

Housing

“Our cause is just, and it continues. Our discoveries in Afghanistan confirmed our worst fears, and showed us the true scope of the task ahead. We have seen the depth of our enemies' hatred in videos, where they laugh about the loss of innocent life. And the depth of their hatred is equaled by the madness of the destruction they design. We have found diagrams of American nuclear power plants and public water facilities, detailed instructions for making chemical weapons, surveillance maps of American cities, and thorough descriptions of landmarks in America and throughout the world.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2002, State of the Union address (January 2002)

Life , World , Fear , Loss

“When Galilei let balls of a particular weight, which he had determined himself, roll down an inclined plain, or Torricelli made the air carry a weight, which he had previously determined to be equal to that of a definite volume of water; or when, in later times, Stahl changed metal into lime, and lime again into metals, by withdrawing and restoring something, a new light flashed on all students of nature. They comprehended that reason has insight into that only, which she herself produces on her own plan, and that she must move forward with the principles of her judgments, according to fixed law, and compel nature to answer her questions, but not let herself be led by nature, as it were in leading strings, because otherwise accidental observations made on no previously fixed plan, will never converge towards a necessary law, which is the only thing that reason seeks and requires. Reason, holding in one hand its principles, according to which concordant phenomena alone can be admitted as laws of nature, and in the other hand the experiment, which it has devised according to those principles, must approach nature, in order to be taught by it: but not in the character of a pupil, who agrees to everything the master likes, but as an appointed judge, who compels the witnesses to answer the questions which he himself proposes. Therefore even the science of physics entirely owes the beneficial revolution in its character to the happy thought, that we ought to seek in nature (and not import into it by means of fiction) whatever reason must learn from nature, and could not know by itself, and that we must do this in accordance with what reason itself has originally placed into nature. Thus only has the study of nature entered on the secure method of a science, after having for many centuries done nothing but grope in the dark.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

Preface to 2nd edition, Tr. F. Max Müller (1905)
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

Law , Question , Nature , Study

“But we are not known for our ability to follow through on our unearned discoveries. We are top-of-the-water adventurers, who limit our opinions of the icebergs to what we can see.”

John Irving (1942) American novelist and screenwriter

A Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (1996)

“I remember in the winter of 1945–46 cycling by myself along an open road near Muttra, when a young Brahmin drew alongside me and after some conversation in Urdu between us, pointed to his home some hundred yards from the road and suggested I go there with him for a drink of water. While my hosts used a brass vessel, I drank from a rough earthen tumbler, which, on thanking them and taking my leave, I smashed on the ground to show that I knew it could not anyhow be used again. 'He is a Hindu,' they said to one another with a smile. There is a sense in which it had been true: the British were married to India, as Venice was married to the sea.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

'A complex fate', The Spectator (6 April 1974), p. 12
1970s

Smile , Home , Drink , Sense

“He strived to destroy the idols of the infidels. He demolished the famous temple of Mahadeva at Bahrare. The temple was dug out from its foundations and the hole (that remained) reached the water level. Another temple at Jagdar was also demolish. Raja Alamadat had got a big temple constructed at Sinpur. (…) The temple was destroyed”

Sikandar Butshikan

by Sikander
Khwajah Nizamu'd-Din Ahmad bin Muhammad Muqim al-Harbi: Tabqat-i-Akbari translated by B. De, Calcutta, 1973

“People usually say that after a fire it is water damage that is the worst. We are still trying to dry out Windsor Castle.”

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1921) member of the British Royal Family, consort to Queen Elizabeth II

Said on a visit to Lockerbie in 1993 to a man who lived in a road where eleven people had been killed by wreckage from the Pan Am jumbo jet, as quoted in "Prince Philip's gaffes" http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/416992.stm, BBC News (10 August 1999)
1990s

People

“Clearing the deck is great, but sailing adventurous waters is the real game. (Just can't do it w/out a clear deck.)”

David Allen (1945) American productivity consultant and author

10 March 2010 https://twitter.com/gtdguy/status/10288329405
Official Twitter profile (@gtdguy) https://twitter.com/gtdguy

Game

“Not only was there a layer of ice above the atmosphere, the Bible teaches that the earth also had a layer of water UNDER the crust of the earth. The earth’s crust today is about 10-25 miles thick. Many who have studied this topic agree that the earth had huge reservoirs of water maybe ten miles down, when the earth was first created. Psalm 24:1-2, “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein. For He hath founded it UPON the seas, and established it UPON the floods..””

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Was the earth founded on the water? Psalm 136:6 tells us that God “stretched out the earth ABOVE the waters.”
Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 46

God , World , Study , Sea

“President Herbert Hoover promised “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.” With warnings about global warming reaching feverish levels, many are having second thoughts about all those cars. It seems they should instead be worrying about the chickens. … It turns out that raising animals for food is a primary cause of land degradation, air pollution, water shortage, water pollution, loss of biodiversity, and not least of all, global warming. …The researchers found that, when it’s all added up, the average American does more to reduce global warming emissions by going vegetarian than by switching to a Prius. … Now that we know a greener diet is even more effective than a greener car, we can make a difference at every single meal, simply by leaving the animals off of our plates. Who would have thought: what’s good for our health is also good for the health of the planet!”

Kathy Freston American self-help writer

"Vegetarian is the New Prius", in the HuffPost (18 January 2007) https://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathy-freston/vegetarian-is-the-new-pri_b_39014.html.

Health , Food , Cars , Loss

“They could hardly believe it, the retreating arses of all that Mameluke or Turkish cavalry, heathen anyway, crying heathen words as they cantered off in gunsnioke and dust-clouds, dropping spears and jewels and good Birmingham pistols. And soon it was water water water, a world of blessed water, the muddy stinking welcoming mother Nile near Rahmaniya.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Napoleon Symphony (1974)

World , Cry

“He always had to use holy water—real holy water, from gallon jugs he filled from the silver urn at St. Anne’s—but though it impressed the customers, all he could see that it actually did was get stuff wet.”

Tim Powers (1952) American writer

The Bible Repairman (p. 2)
Short fiction, The Bible Repairman and Other Stories (2011)

“willow of crystal, a poplar of water,
a pillar of fountain by the wind drawn over,
tree that is firmly rooted and that dances,
turning course of a river that goes curving,
advances and retreats, goes roundabout,
arriving forever:
the calm course of a star
or the spring, appearing without urgency,
water behind a stillness of closed eyelids
flowing all night and pouring out prophecies,
a single presence in the procession of waves
wave over wave until all is overlapped,
in a green sovereignty without decline
a bright hallucination of many wings
when they all open at the height of the sky, course of a journey among the densities
of the days of the future and the fateful
brilliance of misery shining like a bird
that petrifies the forest with its singing
and the annunciations of happiness
among the branches which go disappearing,
hours of light even now pecked away by the birds,
omens which even now fly out of my hand, an actual presence like a burst of singing,
like the song of the wind in a burning building,
a long look holding the whole world suspended,
the world with all its seas and all its mountains,
body of light as it is filtered through agate,
the thighs of light, the belly of light, the bays,
the solar rock and the cloud-colored body,
color of day that goes racing and leaping,
the hour glitters and assumes its body,
now the world stands, visible through your body,
and is transparent through your transparency”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

Sun Stone (1957)

Fate , World , Color , Mountain

“To be sung of a summer night on the water.
Ooh, on the water.
"Ta, ta-ta!
Hmm.
Ta, ta-ta!
In B, Fenby!"”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, Never for Ever (1980)

Summer , Night

“[Pelsaert laments] “the utter subjection and poverty of the common people-poverty so great and miserable that the life of the people can be depicted or accurately described only as the home of stark want and the dwelling place of bitter woe.” He continues: “There are three classes of people who are indeed nominally free, but whose status differs very little from voluntary slavery-workmen, peons or servants and shopkeepers. For the workmen there are two scourges, the first of which is low wages. Goldsmiths, painters (of cloth or chintz), embroiderers, carpet makers, cotton or silk weavers, black-smiths, copper-smiths, tailors, masons, builders, stone-cutters, a hundred crafts in all-any of these working from morning to night can earn only 5 or 6 tackas (tankahs), that is 4 or 5 strivers in wages. The second (scourge) is (the oppression of) the Governor, the nobles, the Diwan, the Kotwal, the Bakshi, and other royal officers. If any of these wants a workman, the man is not asked if he is willing to come, but is seized in the house or in the street, well beaten if he should dare to raise any objection, and in the evening paid half his wages, or nothing at all. From these facts the nature of their food can be easily inferred… For their monotonous daily food they have nothing but a little khichri… in the day time, they munch a little parched pulse or other grain, which they say suffices for their lean stomachs… Their houses are built of mud with thatched roofs. Furniture there is little or none, except some earthenware pots to hold water and for cooking… Their bedclothes are scanty, merely a sheet or perhaps two… this is sufficient in the hot weather, but the bitter cold nights are miserable indeed, and they try to keep warm over little cowdung fires… the smoke from these fires all over the city is so great that the eyes run, and the throat seems to be choked.””

Francisco Pelsaert (1591–1630) Dutch merchant, commander of the ship Batavia

Quoted from Lal, K. S. (1992). The legacy of Muslim rule in India. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. Chapter 7
Jahangir’s India

Life , People , Food , Home

“The descendants of those who crucified Christ… have taken ownership of the riches of the world, a minority has taken ownership of the gold of the world, the silver, the minerals, water, the good lands, petrol, well, the riches, and they have concentrated the riches in a small number of hands.”

Hugo Chávez (1954–2013) 48th President of Venezuela

Christmas Speech at a rehabilitation center on December 24th, 2005. http://www.gobiernoenlinea.gob.ve/docMgr/sharedfiles/Chavez_visita_Centro_Manantial_de_los_suenos24122005.pdf
2005

World , Christ

Quotes about water page 19

Quotes about water
page 19