“If there is but little water in the stream, it is the fault, not of the channel, but of the source.”

25 November 2011, Twitter
Speaking & Features

A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Müller Written by Himself, Third Part.
Third Part of Narrative

Qual diverrà quel fiume,
Nel lungo suo cammino,
Se al fonte ancor vicino
É torbido così?
Part I.
Morte d' Abele (1732)

The Omnipresence of the Deity, Part i, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare: "We take this to be, on the whole, the worst similitude in the world. In the first place, no stream meanders or can possibly meander level with the fount. In the next place, if streams did meander level with their founts, no two motions can be less like each other than that of meandering level and that of mounting upwards", Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, Review of Montgomery's Poems (Eleventh Edition), Edinburgh Review, (April, 1830). These lines were omitted in the subsequent edition of the poem.

De Abaitua interview (1998)
Context: I might do a work to put me in contact with the god Mercury. If the information I get from that is valuable to me, and new enough, it doesn’t really matter whether the god Mercury is there at all, does it? There is a channel that I have called the god Mercury, some sort of information source I have named.

A phrase used in many notable speeches by King, which is actually a quotation of Amos 5:24 in the Bible.
Misattributed
Variant: Justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.
Source: Letter from the Birmingham Jail

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 548.

Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)