Quotes about flow

A collection of quotes on the topic of flow, likeness, life, use.

Zeno of Citium quote: “Happiness is a good flow of life.”

Haruki Murakami quote: “Life is not like water. Things in life don't necessarily flow over the shortest possible route.”

Quotes about flow

“I believe that academics do not flow naturally with this world, since, many times, the Academy, from those all-knowing egos, which are not lacking, turns the literary into a mere object lacking spirit.”

José Baroja (1983) Chilean author and editor

Source: Fuente: https://portal.ucm.cl/noticias/academico-la-ucm-presento-segunda-antologia-hijo-perra-otros-cuentos

World, Time, Nature

“Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. And between the two my life flows.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj book I Am That

I am
Variant: Love says 'I am everything.' Wisdom says 'I am nothing.' Between the two, my life flows.
Source: I Am That
Context: "I find that somehow, by shifting the focus of attention, I become the very thing I look at, and experience the kind of consciousness it has; I become the inner witness of the thing. I call this capacity of entering other focal points of consciousness, love; you may give it any name you like. Love says 'I am everything'. Wisdom says "I am nothing'. Between the two, my life flows. Since at any point of time and space I can be both the subject and the object of experience, I express it by saying that I am both, and neither, and beyond both."

Love, Life, Wisdom

“Happiness is a good flow of life.”

Zeno of Citium (-334–-263 BC) ancient Greek philosopher

As quoted by Stobaeus, ii. 77.

Life, Happiness

“A Woman in harmony with her spirit
is like a river flowing.
She goes where she will without pretense and arrives at her destination
prepared to be herself
and only herself”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

“If you hate, then you have been defeated.
Do not allow anyone to diminish you.
Do not fall down to their level that you allow them to lower yourself enough to hate them.
It is exhausting to hate so much…not to mention toxic.
It has caused a prodigious amount of problems that negatively affect you, however it has never solved anything yet.
Do not squander a second of your time to even allow that person to occupy even a tiny part of your mind at all.
Often we hate that which we fear the most.
Let it flow out of you.
Then see how much lighter you feel in your mind, body and soul.”

Stephie Pahlavi Zan

Soul, Personality, Problem, Hate

“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

Way, Water

“I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

Feeling, Spring

“God is the source of my supply. His riches flow to me freely, copiously, and abundantly. All my financial and other needs are met at every moment of time and point of space; there is always a divine surplus.”

Joseph Murphy (1898–1981) American writer

God, Time

“You can only stop the flow of thoughts by refusing to have any interest in it.”

Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950) Indian religious leader

“And we'll be right back after these messages, fellas grab ya nuttsacks chicks squeeze your breastsess, we ain't all that grown it's still funny like goin to the store with your own rainbow money, since that had an insane flow sonny”

MF Doom (1971) hip hop artist from America

With DANGERDOOM, "Old School", The Mouse and the Mask (2005)
Sourced Lines

Money

“Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then — as I am listening now.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley To a Skylark

St. 21
To a Skylark (1821)

World, Madness

“Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.”

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) Jewish-American political theorist

Way, History, Forgiveness

“I am rooted, but I flow.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

“Perched up high on a rooftop,
like a bird I'm having evil thoughts,
A black hood covers my face
as death flows through my mind at its own pace.”

Eazy-E (1963–1995) American rapper and producer

"Neighborhood Sniper", 5150: Home 4 tha Sick (1992).
1990s

Death, Bird, Evil

“The tears were flowing again, but he smiled. "That's how it is every day", he said, "all over the world."”

Stephen King book The Green Mile

The Green Mile (1996)
Context: "He kill them with they love", John said. "They love for each other. You see how it was?" I nodded, incapable of speech.
He smiled. The tears were flowing again, but he smiled. "That's how it is every day", he said, "all over the world."

World, Smile, Tear

“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”

Laozi (-604) semi-legendary Chinese figure, attributed to the 6th century, regarded as the author of the Tao Te Ching and fou…

This quotation's origin is actually unknown, however it is not found in the Dao De Jing.
生命是一连串的自发的自然变化。逆流而动只会徒增伤悲。接受现实，万物自然循着规律发展。
Misattributed
Variant: Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them — that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.

Powerful, Life, Way, Nature

“Water shapes its course according to the nature of the ground over which it flows; the soldier works out his victory in relation to the foe whom he is facing. Therefore, just as water retains no constant shape, so in warfare there are no constant conditions. He who can modify his tactics in relation to his opponent and thereby succeed in winning, may be called a heaven-born captain.”

Sun Tzu (-543–-495 BC) ancient Chinese military general, strategist and philosopher from the Zhou Dynasty

Lionel Giles translation
Source: The Art of War, Chapter VI · Weaknesses and Strengths

Nature, Water, Victory

“I dream that one day
we will look at each other
in the same way we look at the sun,
and we will touch each other
like the sun on earth,
and the blessings of light
will flow into our hearts.”

Alexis Karpouzos (1967)

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/14108295.alexis_karpouzos?page=2

Sun, Light, Dreams, Heart

“Reason flows from the blending of rational thought and feeling. If the two functions are torn apart, thinking deteriorates into schizoid intellectual activity and feeling deteriorates into neurotic life-damaging passions.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

Life, Feeling, Thinking, Passion

“What is one man's life compared to the eternity of time and space? No more than a snowflake that glitters in the sun for a moment before melting into the flow of time.”

Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989) Japanese cartoonist and animator

Source: Buddha, Vol. 2: The Four Encounters

Life, Time, Sun

“When I am….. completely myself, entirely alone… or during the night when I cannot sleep, it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how these ideas come I know not nor can I force them.”

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) Austrian Romantic composer

From a letter now regarded as a forgery by Johann Friedrich Rochlitz http://www.aproposmozart.com/Stafford%20--%20Mozart%20and%20genius.rev.ref.pdf, http://www.mozartforum.com/Lore/article.php?id=108, http://www.mozartforum.com/Lore/article.php?id=106 Misattributed Context: When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer — say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep — it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best, and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not, nor can I force them.

Idea, Sleep, Night

“Let those find fault whose wit's so very small,
They've need to show that they can think at all;
Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow;
He who would search for pearls, must dive below.”

John Dryden All for Love

Prologue
Source: All for Love (1678)
Context: Let those find fault whose wit's so very small,
They've need to show that they can think at all;
Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow;
He who would search for pearls, must dive below.
Fops may have leave to level all they can;
As pigmies would be glad to lop a man.
Half-wits are fleas; so little and so light,
We scarce could know they live, but that they bite.

Error, Search, Thinking

“Isn't it strange how life won't flow, like a river, but moves in jumps, as if it were held back by locks that are opened now and then to let it jump forwards in a kind of flood?”

Anita Desai (1937) Indian novelist

Life

“Fire wants to burn
Water wants to flow
Air wants to rise
Earth wants to bind
Chaos wants to devour
Cal wants to live”

Cassandra Clare book The Iron Trial

Source: The Iron Trial

Water

“Flow with whatever may happen, and let your mind be free: Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.”

Zhuangzi (-369–-286 BC) classic Chinese philosopher

Source: Nan-Hua-Ch'en-Ching, or, the Treatise of the transcendent master from Nan-Hua

“This is how it should be done: lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times.”

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) French philosopher

Time

“J. M. W. Turner's Poem dedicated to Ivan Aivazovsky (1842)

Like a curtain slowly drawn
It stops suddenly half open,
Or, like grief itself, filled with gentle hope,
It becomes lighter in the shore-less dark,
Thus the moon barely wanes
Winding her way above the storm-tossed sea.
Stand upon this hill and behold endlessly
This scene of a formidable sea,
And it will seem to thee a waking dream.
That secret mind flowing in thee
Which even the day cannot scatter,
The serenity of thinking and the beating of the heart
Will enchain thee in this vision;
This golden-silver moon
Standing lonely over the sea,
All curtain the grief of even the hopeless.
And it appears that through the tempest
Moves a light caressing wind,
While the sea swells up with a roar,
Sometimes, like a battlefield it looks to me
The tempestuous sea,
Where the moon itself is a brilliant golden crown
Of a great king.
But even that moon is always beneath thee
Oh Master most high,
Oh forgive thou me
If even this master was frightened for a moment
Oh, noble moment, by art betrayed…
And how may one not delight in thee,
Oh thou young boy, but forgive thou me,
If I shall bend my white head
Before thy art divine
Thy bliss-wrought genius…”

J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) British Romantic landscape painter, water-colourist, and printmaker

Source: J.M.W. Turner

Secret, Dreams, Hope, Art

“What I want in my life is compassion, a flow between myself and others based on a mutual giving from the heart.”

Marshall B. Rosenberg (1934–2015) American psychologist

Source: Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life

Life, Heart

“A genuine relationship is one that is not dominated by the ego with its image-making and self-seeking. In a genuine relationship, there is an outward flow of open, alert attention toward the other person in which there is no wanting whatsoever.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Personality

“Trying to do the Lord's work in your own strength is the most confusing, exhausting, and tedious of all work. But when you are filled with the Holy Spirit, then the ministry of Jesus just flows out of you.”

Corrie ten Boom (1892–1983) Dutch resistance hero and writer

“Sometimes when I'm alone
I Cry,
Cause I am on my own.
The tears I cry are bitter and warm.
They flow with life but take no form
I Cry because my heart is torn.
I find it difficult to carry on.
If I had an ear to confide in,
I would cry among my treasured friend,
but who do you know that stops that long,
to help another carry on.
The world moves fast and it would rather pass by.
Then to stop and see what makes one cry,
so painful and sad.
And sometimes…
I Cry
and no one cares about why.”

Tupac Shakur (1971–1996) rapper and actor

Life, Pain, World, Sadness

“Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.”

Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972) Japanese author, Nobel Prize winner

Way, Time

“We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

The Archaic Revival (1991)
Context: The Beliefs of a Witoto shaman and the beliefs of a Princeton phenomenologist have an equal chance of being correct, and there are no arbiters of who is right. Here is something we have not assimilated. We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.

Fear, Sense, Heart

“How strange! This bed on which I shall lie has been slept on by more than one dying man, but today it does not repel me! Who knows what corpses have lain on it and for how long? But is a corpse any worse than I? A corpse too knows nothing of its father, mother or sisters or Titus. Nor has a corpse a sweetheart. A corpse, too, is pale, like me. A corpse is cold, just as I am cold and indifferent to everything. A corpse has ceased to live, and I too have had enough of life…. Why do we live on through this wretched life which only devours us and serves to turn us into corpses? The clocks in the Stuttgart belfries strike the midnight hour. Oh how many people have become corpses at this moment! Mothers have been torn from their children, children from their mothers - how many plans have come to nothing, how much sorrow has sprung from these depths, and how much relief!… Virtue and vice have come in the end to the same thing! It seems that to die is man's finest action - and what might be his worst? To be born, since that is the exact opposite of his best deed. It is therefore right of me to be angry that I was ever born into this world! Why was I not prevented from remaining in a world where I am utterly useless? What good can my existence bring to anyone? … But wait, wait! What's this? Tears? How long it is since they flowed! How is this, seeing that an arid melancholy has held me for so long in its grip? How good it feels - and sorrowful. Sad but kindly tears! What a strange emotion! Sad but blessed. It is not good for one to be sad, and yet how pleasant it is - a strange state…”

Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849) Polish composer

Stuttgart. After 8th September 1831.
Source: "Selected Correspondence Of Fryderyk Chopin"; http://archive.org/stream/selectedcorrespo002644mbp/selectedcorrespo002644mbp_djvu.txt

Life, Children, People, Lie

“Death, go somewhere, get lost! I’m not done as yet –
Joy still flows from the amphora of colors into my cupped hands.”

Ghani Khan (1914–1996) Pakistani poet

Reverie, st. 9

Death, Color, Joy

“In deep meditation the flow of concentration is continuous like the flow of oil.”

Patañjali (-200–-150 BC) ancient Indian scholar(s) of grammar and linguistics, of yoga, of medical treatises

The Mahābhāṣya

“Upon the earth are animals and men, some in a middle region, others dwelling about the air as we dwell about the sea; others in islands which the air flows round, near the continent; and in a word, the air is used by them as the water and the sea are by us, and the ether is to them as the air is to us. Moreover, the temperament of their seasons is such that they have no disease, and live much longer than we do, and have sight and hearing and smell, and all the other senses, in far greater perfection, in the same degree that air is purer than water or the ether than air. Also they have temples and sacred places in which the gods really dwell, and they hear their voices and receive their answers and are conscious of them and hold converse with them, and they see the sun, moon, and stars as they really are, and their other blessedness is of a piece with this.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

Men, God, Disease, Star

“Gambling is a kind of tax: a tax on stupidity. A tax on greed. Some money changes hands at random, but the net cash flow always goes one way - to the Government, to the casino operators, to the bookies, to the crime syndicates. If you ever do win, you won't have won against them. They'll still be getting their share. You'll have won against all the penniless losers, that's all.”

Greg Egan book Eugene

Eugene
Fiction, Axiomatic (1995)

Money, Stupidity, Way, Change

“Now there was fought a battle such as men have not seen the like. And the earth was covered with steel, and arrows fell from the clouds like hail, and the ground was torn with hoofs, and blood flowed like water upon the plains. And the dead lay around in masses, and the feet of the horses could not stir because of them.”

Ferdowsi book Shahnameh

Translation of Helen Zimmern http://classics.mit.edu/Ferdowsi/kings.14.defeatafrasiyab.html Shahnameh

Men, Water, Horse, Dead

“It is in the body politic, as in the natural, those disorders are most dangerous that flow from the head.”
Utque in corporibus sic in imperio gravissimus est morbus, qui a capite diffunditur.

Pliny the Younger (61–113) Roman writer

Letter 22, 7.
Letters, Book IV

Nature

“Swords flashed like lightning amid the blackness of clouds, and fountains of blood flowed like the fall of setting stars. The friends of God defeated their obstinate opponents, and quickly put them to a complete rout. Noon had not arrived when the Musulmans had wreaked their vengeance on the infidel enemies of Allah, killing 15,000 of them, spreading them like a carpet over the ground, and making them food for beasts and birds of prey… The enemy of God, Jaipal, and his children and grandchildren,… were taken prisoners, and being strongly bound with ropes, were carried before the Sultan, like as evildoers, on whose faces the fumes of infidelity are evident, who are covered with the vapours of misfortune, will be bound and carried to Hell. Some had their arms forcibly tied behind their backs, some were seized by the cheek, some were driven by blows on the neck. The necklace was taken off the neck of Jaipal, - composed of large pearls and shining gems and rubies set in gold, of which the value was two hundred thousand dinars; and twice that value was obtained from necks of those of his relatives who were taken prisoners, or slain, and had become the food of the mouths of hyenas and vultures. Allah also bestowed upon his friends such an amount of booty as was beyond all bounds and all calculation, including five hundred thousand slaves, beautiful men and women. The Sultan returned with his followers to his camp, having plundered immensely, by Allah's aid, having obtained the victory, and thankful to Allah… This splendid and celebrated action took place on Thursday, the 8th of Muharram, 392 H., 27th November, 1001 AD.”

Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030) Sultan of Ghazni

About the defeat of Jaipal. Tarikh Yamini (Kitabu-l Yamini) by Al Utbi, in Elliot and Dowson, Vol. II : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. p. 27 Also quoted (in part) in Jain, Meenakshi (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts.
Quotes from Tarikh Yamini (Kitabu-l Yamini) by Al Utbi

Women, Men, God, Children

“Charisms are not distributed at random but are dispensed by God to supply what is needful and lacking in his Church at each historical moment. If they are from God, they usually do not flow with the latest fashionable trend but much more likely contain an antidote and remedy for the perils of the time.”

Hans Urs Von Balthasar (1905–1988) Swedish Catholic theologian

First Glance at Adrienne von Speyr (1968)

God, Fashion, Time

“All that is done and said and thought and suffered upon the Earth combine together, and flow onward in one broad resistless current toward those great results to which they are determined by the will of God.
We build slowly and destroy swiftly. Our Ancient Brethren who built the Temples at Jerusalem, with many myriad blows felled, hewed, and squared the cedars, and quarried the stones, and car»ed the intricate ornaments, which were to be the Temples. Stone after stone, by the combined effort and long toil of Apprentice, Fellow-Craft, and Master, the walls arose; slowly the roof was framed and fashioned; and many years elapsed, before, at length, the Houses stood finished, all fit and ready for the Worship of God, gorgeous in the sunny splendors of the atmosphere of Palestine. So they were built. A single motion of the arm of a rude, barbarous Assyrian Spearman, or drunken Roman or Gothic Legionary of Titus, moved by a senseless impulse of the brutal will, flung in the blazing brand; and, with no further human agency, a few short hours sufficed to consume and melt each Temple to a smoking mass of black unsightly ruin.
Be patient, therefore, my Brother, and wait!
The issues are with God: To do,
Of right belongs to us.
Therefore faint not, nor be weary in well-doing! Be not discouraged at men's apathy, nor disgusted with their follies, nor tired of their indifference! Care not for returns and results; but see only what there is to do, and do it, leaving the results to God! Soldier of the Cross! Sworn Knight of Justice, Truth, and Toleration! Good Knight and True! be patient and work!”

Albert Pike book Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. XIX : Grand Pontiff, p. 321

Men, God, Truth, Justice

“Depending on the circumstance, you should be: hard as a diamond, flexible as a willow, smooth-flowing like water, or as empty as space.”

Morihei Ueshiba (1883–1969) founder of aikido

The Art of Peace (1992)
Context: Techniques employ four qualities that reflect the nature of our world. Depending on the circumstance, you should be: hard as a diamond, flexible as a willow, smooth-flowing like water, or as empty as space.

Water, Dependency

“The proper education of the young does not consist in stuffing their heads with a mass of words, sentences, and ideas dragged together out of various authors, but in opening up their understanding to the outer world, so that a living stream may flow from their own minds, just as leaves, flowers, and fruit spring from the bud on a tree.”

John Amos Comenius (1592–1670) Czech teacher, educator, philosopher and writer

Tree, Understanding, Spring, Flowers

“Some will never admire or respect you; not because they believe you’re callous or possess an intense demeanor, instead, they’re intimidated of what you’re becoming; powerful, and thus, envy flows within them.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

Envy

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

Envy

“We know so little,
so little, almost nothing
and this is only truth,
when and from where?
from the fissure of infinity
and the unreel of time,
lonely splinters
we wander on dreamy travels,
and the truth a flowing shadow
and it call us,
but the call still is not heard,
nor does the caller reveal his face.
and people voicelessly love and die,
because the truth dosen't speak
but dance in the harmony of unity.”

Alexis Karpouzos (1967)

Source: An ocean of souls

“Our road not marked on maps.
Fugitives of the centuries,
our origin is the breathing
and our destination is exhalation,
A thousand suns are flowing in our blood,
and the vision of infinity is always chasing us.
The form cannot tame us,
Our days are a fire and our nights a sea.”

Alexis Karpouzos (1967)

Source: https://hellopoetry.com/alexis-karpouzos/

Sun, Sea, Night

“Wealth can still bring you much closer to your Creator. Since you will have plenty of time to worship and relax, instead of sweating just to create daily cash flow.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Time, Wealth

“Every action of man, the highest as well as the lowest, is egoistic; for it flows from a certain individuality, a certain I, with a sufficient motive, and can in no way be omitted. To go into the reason of the difference of characters is not the place here; we have simply to accept it as a fact. Now it is just as impossible for the merciful man to let his neighbor starve as it is for the hard-hearted man to help the poor. Each of the two acts according to his character, his nature, his ego, his happiness, consequently egoistically; for if the merciful one did not dry the tears of others, would he be happy? And if the hard-hearted one relieved the suffering of others, would he be satisfied?”

Philipp Mainländer (1841–1876) German poet and philosopher

Source: Philosophie der Erlösung, Erster Band (2014), Ethik, § 11 ISBN 978-1494963262

Motivation, Nature, Tear, Happiness

“Fire wants to burn
Water wants to flow
Air wants to rise
Earth wants to bind
Chaos wants to devour
-Iyana Sharpe”

isharpe001

Water

“The blood of Abraham,1 God’s father of the chosen, still flows in the veins of Arab, Jew, and Christian, and too much of it has been spilled in grasping for the inheritance of the revered patriarch in the Middle East. The spilled blood in the Holy Land still cries out to God—an anguished cry for peace.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Source: Palestine Peace Not Apartheid

God, Peace, Cry

“Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts or happenings. It consist mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever flowing through one's head.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Life

“Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Suffering, Time

“Ceaseless as the interminable voices of the bell-cricket, all night till dawn my tears flow.”

Murasaki Shikibu book The Tale of Genji

Source: Tale of Genji, The Tale of Genji, trans. Arthur Waley, Ch. 1

Tear, Night

“Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart.”

Washington Irving (1783–1859) writer, historian and diplomat from the United States

Attributed to Irving as early as 1883. [Hit and miss : a story of real life, Angie Stewart, Manly, Chicago, J.L. Regan, 1883, i, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/osu.32435018229575?urlappend=%3Bseq=7] However, it does not seem to appear in Irving's known works. Other citations from the same year leave the quotation unattributed. [Henry S. (ed.), Clubb, The Peacemaker and Court of Arbitration, Volume 1, Universal Peace Union, 1883, 125, Philadelphia, https://books.google.com/books?id=Uu84AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA125] [The Australian Women's Magazine and Domestic Journal, Vol. 2 No. 2 (May 1883), 1883, Melbourne, 435, https://books.google.com/books?id=mq0sAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA435]. A similar passage is found in a pseudonymous novel published two years earlier in 1881: "Julia knew that sacrifices to patience are not in vain. Although they often do not produce the happiness for which they are made, they will, always, flow back and soften and purify the heart of the one who makes them". [Illma, Or, Which was Wife?, Miss, M.L.A., Cornwell & Johnson, 1881, 239, New York, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/osu.32435017658592?urlappend=%3Bseq=245]
Disputed

Heartbreaking, love, Relationship, Cute

“Women Are Not Roses

Women have no
beginning
only continual
flows.

Though rivers flow
women are not
rivers.

Women are not
roses
they are not oceans
or stars.

i would like to tell
her this but
i think she
already knows.”

Ana Castillo (1953) novelist, poet, essayist, short story writer

Source: Women Are Not Roses

Women, Star, Thinking

“To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.”

Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) French writer and philosopher

A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire (1988)

Beauty, Feeling, Reading

“Thoughts are free and subject to no rule. On them rests the freedom of man, and they tower above the light of nature… create a new heaven, a new firmament, a new source of energy from which new arts flow.”

Paracelsus (1493–1541) Swiss physician and alchemist

Art, Nature, Freedom, Light

“It is easy enough to be pleasant,
When life flows by like a song,
But the man worth while is one who will smile,
When everything goes dead wrong.”

Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919) American author and poet

For Men, Life, Smile, Dead

“Lie on the bridge and watch the water flowing past. Or run, or wade through the swamp in your red boots. Or roll yourself up and listen to the rain falling on the roof. It's very easy to enjoy yourself.”

Tove Jansson book Moominvalley in November

Source: Moominvalley in November

Lie, Water, Past

“In and out of my heart flowed my rainbow blood.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

Heart

“The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) Suffragist and Women's Rights activist

Peaceful, Life, Truth, Fear

“as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.”

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

Love, Understanding, Water

“Summer is the season of motion, winter is the season of form. In summer everything moves save the fixed and inert. Down the hill flows the west wind, making wavelets in the shorter grass and great billows in the standing hay; the tree in full leaf sways its heavy boughs below and tosses its leaves above; the weed by the gate bends and turns when the wind blows down the road. It is the shadow of moving things that we usually see, and the shadows are themselves in motion. The shadow of a branch, speckled through with light, wavers across the lawn, the sprawling shadow of the weed moves and sways across the dust.”

Henry Beston (1888–1968) American writer

Source: The Northern Farm: A Glorious Year on a Small Maine Farm

Tree, Light, Grass, Winter

“I can tell you that solitude
Is not all exaltation, inner space
Where the soul breathes and work can be done.
Solitude exposes the nerve,
Raises up ghosts.
The past, never at rest, flows through it.”

May Sarton (1912–1995) American poet, novelist, and memoirist

Soul, Solitude, Past

“Compassion for animals is intimately connected with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he, who is cruel to living creatures, cannot be a good man. Moreover, this compassion manifestly flows from the same source whence arise the virtues of justice and loving-kindness towards men.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

Part III, Ch. VIII, 7, p. 223 https://archive.org/stream/basisofmorality00schoiala#page/223/mode/2up On the Basis of Morality (1840) Source: The Basis of Morality

Love, Men, Justice, Confidence

“Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.”

Lisa See book Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

Source: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

Books, Reading

“Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins--of happiness and unhappiness.”

Virginia Woolf book Jacob's Room

Source: Jacob's Room

Happiness

“May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Children, Way

“Faith does not need to push the river because faith is able to trust that there is a river. The river is flowing. We are in it.”

Richard Rohr (1943) American spiritual writer, speaker, teacher, Catholic Franciscan priest

Faith

“Running water never grows stale. So you just have to 'keep on flowing.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

Source: The Warrior Within : The Philosophies of Bruce Lee (1996), p. 48

Water

“To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.”

Aaron Copland (1900–1990) American composer, composition teacher, writer, and conductor

Music, Time

“Life is not like water. Things in life don't necessarily flow over the shortest possible route.”

Haruki Murakami book 1Q84

Source: 1Q84

Life, Water

“water is fearless, you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup, you put water into a teapot it becomes the teapot, water can flow drip, creap, or crash!”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

Water

“No mistake about it. Ice is cold; roses are red; I'm in love. And this love is about to carry me off somewhere. The current's too overpowering; I don't have any choice. It may very well be a special place, some place I've never seen before. Danger may be lurking there, something that may end up wounding me deeply, fatally. I might end up losing everything. But there's no turning back. I can only go with the flow. Even if it means I'll be burned up, gone forever.”

Haruki Murakami book Sputnik Sweetheart

Source: Sputnik Sweetheart

Love

“Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping.”

Virginia Woolf book A Room of One's Own

Source: A Room of One's Own

Truth, Parting

“As in poetry, so in prayer, the whole subject matter should be furnished by the heart, and the understanding should be allowed only to shape and arrange the effusions of the heart in the manner best adapted to answer the end designed. From the fullness of a heart overflowing with holy affections, as from a copious fountain, we should pour forth a torrent of pious, humble, and ardently affectionate feelings; while our understandings only shape the channel and teach the gushing streams of devotion where to flow, and when to stop.”

Edward Payson (1783–1827) American religious leader

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 464.

Feeling, Understanding, Heart

“Whatever is well conceived is clearly said,
And the words to say it flow with ease.”

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711) French poet and critic

Ce que l'on conçoit bien s'énonce clairement,
Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément.
Canto I, l. 153
The Art of Poetry (1674)

“But, Madam, let your grief be laid aside,
And let the fountain of your tears be dry'd,
In vain they flow to wet the dusty plain,
Your sighs are wafted to the skies in vain,
Your pains they witness, but they can no more,
While Death reigns tyrant o'er this mortal shore.”

Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784) American poet

"To a Gentleman and Lady on the Death of the Lady's Brother and Sister, and a Child of the Name of Avis, aged one Year." st. 2, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773)

Death, Pain, Tear

“I'm not a biter, I'm a writer for myself and others / I say a B. I. G. verse, I'm only biggin' up my brother / Biggin' up my borough, I'm big enough to do it / I'm that thorough, plus I know my own flow is foolish / So them rings and things you sing about, bring 'em out / It's hard to yell when the bar-rell's in your mouth”

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

w:What More Can I Say'What more Can I Say
The Black Album (2003)

Singing

“Even in childhood I watched the hours flow, independent of any reference, any action, any event, the disjunction of time from what was not itself, its autonomous existence, its special status, its empire, its tyranny. I remember quite clearly that afternoon when, for the first time, confronting the empty universe, I was no more than a passage of moments reluctant to go on playing their proper parts. Time was coming unstuck from being — at my expense.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Universe, Time, Parting, Childhood

“Successful men of all the ages have learned to multiply themselves by gathering thought energy into a high potential and using it in the direction of the purpose intended. Every successful man or great genius has three particular qualities in common. The most conspicuous of these is that their minds grow more brilliant as they grow older, instead of less brilliant. Great men’s lives begin at forty, where the mediocre man’s life ends. The genius remains an ever-flowing fountain of creative achievement until the very last breath he draws. The geniuses have learned how to gather thought energy together to use for transforming their conceptions into material forms. The thinking of creative and successful men is never exerted in any direction other that that intended. That is why great men produce a prodigious amount of work, seemingly without effort and without fatigue. The amount of work such men leave to posterity is amazing. When one considers such men of our times as Edison, Henry Ford or Theodore Roosevelt, one will find the three characteristics I have mentioned common to every one of them.”

Walter Russell (1871–1963) American philosopher

The Man who Tapped the Secrets of the Universe

Life, Men, Age, Thinking

“My flow is in the pocket like Wallace
I got the bounce like hydraulics
I can't call it
I got the swerve like alcoholics”

Kanye West (1977) American rapper, singer and songwriter

Get Em High
Lyrics, The College Dropout (2004)

Alcohol

“From his (Karna’s) low caste came rejection, came every disadvantage; but he always played and fought fair! So his life, though a series of disappointments and defeats to the very end – his slaying by Arjuna– appealed to me as a boy as the greatest of triumphs. I still think of the tournament where Arjuna had been victor, and then of Karna coming as a stranger to challenge him. Questioned of name and birth, he replies, “I am my own ancestor! You do not ask the might Ganges from which of its many springs it comes: its own flow justifies itself, so shall my deeds me! [Further he wrote :] Like that of my boyhood’s hero Karna, my life has been ever one of combat and must be to the last. It is not for man to complain of circumstances, but bravely to accept, to confront, and to dominate them.”

Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937) Bengali polymath, physicist, biologist, botanist and archaeologist

The character of Karna in Mahabharata influenced him deeply.
Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose in Vijayaprasara

Life, Disappointment, Spring, Boy

“Here I still flow in God as a small stream of time,
There I shall be a sea of blessedness sublime”

Angelus Silesius (1624–1677) German writer

The Cherubinic Wanderer

God, Time, Sea

“With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can't start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It's like quicksand… hopeless from the start.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

1950-07-08
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000)

Life, Dead

“Ethics could teach us only those purposes and ideals. If the teachers seeks insight into the means by which the aim can be reached, into the facts by which the child can be molded, his way must lead from ethics to psychology. (…) Water flows downhill, anyhow, but to bring the water uphill hydraulic forces are indeed necessary. To overcome nature and instead to prepare for a life of ideals, to inhibit personal desires and instead to learn to serve the higher purposes indeed demands most serious and most systematic efforts. It is the teachers' task to make these efforts with all his best knowledge of mind and body, of social and of cultural values.”

Hugo Munsterberg (1863–1916) German-American psychologist, philosopher and agitator

Hugo Munsterberg, Psychology and the Teacher, 1909 (new edition, 2006), pp. 64-65.

Life, Way, Nature, Knowledge

“We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world. We give little thought to the machinery that generates the sun light that makes life possible, to the gravity that glues us to an Earth that would otherwise sent us spinning off into space, or to the atoms of which we are made and on whose stability we fundamentally depend. Few of us spend much time wondering why nature is the way it is, where the cosmos came from, or whether it was always there, if time will one day flow backwards or whether there are ultimate limits to what humans can know. What is the smallest piece of matter, why we remember the past and not the future, and why there is the universe?”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

[citation needed]
Others

Life, World, Way, Understanding

“Young love is errant, but it needs to get around;
The time and practice make it strong and sound.
That bull you fear, you petted when it wasn't big;
What now you sleep beneath was once a twig.
That little stream, in gaining waters as it goes,
Grows stronger, till at last a river flows.”
Dum novus errat amor, vires sibi colligat usu: Si bene nutrieris, tempore firmus erit. Quem taurum metuis, vitulum mulcere solebas: Sub qua nunc recubas arbore, virga fuit: Nascitur exiguus, sed opes adquirit eundo, Quaque venit, multas accipit amnis aquas.

Ovid book Ars amatoria

Book II, lines 339–344 (tr. Len Krisak)
Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love)

Love, Fear, Sleep, Strong

“If solid happiness we prize,
Within our breast this jewel lies,
And they are fools who roam.
The world has nothing to bestow;
From our own selves our joys must flow,
And that dear hut, our home.”

Nathaniel Cotton (1707–1788) British writer

The Fireside, stanza 3, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

World, Fools, Home, Joy

“O thou that rollest above, round as the shield of my fathers! Whence are thy beams, O sun! thy everlasting light? Thou comest forth in thy awful beauty; the stars hide themselves in the sky; the moon, cold and pale, sinks in the western wave; but thou thyself movest alone. Who can be a companion of thy course? The oaks of the mountains fall; the mountains themselves decay with years; the ocean shrinks and grows again; the moon herself is lost in heaven: but thou art for ever the same, rejoicing in the brightness of thy course. When the world is dark with tempests, when thunder rolls and lightning flies, thou lookest in thy beauty from the clouds, and laughest at the storm. But to Ossian thou lookest in vain, for he beholds thy beams no more: whether thy yellow hair flows on the eastern clouds, or thou tremblest at the gates of the west. But thou art, perhaps, like me, for a season; thy years will have an end. Thou shalt sleep in thy clouds, careless of the voice of the morning. Exult then, O sun, in the strength of thy youth!”

James Macpherson (1736–1796) Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician

"Carthon", pp. 163–164
The Poems of Ossian

Youth, World, Beauty, Art

“Perhaps man will rise ever higher as soon as he ceases to flow out into a god.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Sec. 285
The Gay Science (1882)

God

“It now remains that we find the amount of time of descent through the channel. This we shall obtain from the marvelous property of the pendulum, which is that it makes all its vibrations, large or small, in equal times. This requires, once and for all, that two or three or four patient and curious friends, having noted a fixed star that stands against some fixed marker, taking a pendulum of any length, shall go counting its vibrations during the whole time of return of the fixed star to its original point, and this will be the number of vibrations in 24 hours. From the number of these we can find the number of vibrations of any other pendulums, longer or shorter, at will, so that if for example those counted by us in 24 hours were 234,567, then taking another shorter pendulum with which one counts 800 vibrations while another counts 150 of the longer pendulum, we already have, by the golden rule, the number of vibrations for the whole time of 24 hours; and if we want to know the time of descent through the channel, we can easily find not only the minutes, seconds, and sixtieths of seconds, but beyond that as we please. It is true that we can pass a more exact measure by having observed the flow of water through a thin passage, for by collecting this and having weighed what passes in one minute, for example, then by weighing what passes in the time of descent through the channel we can find the most exact measure and quantity of this time, especially by making use of a balance so precise as to weigh one sixtieth of a grain.”

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) Italian mathematician, physicist, philosopher and astronomer

Letter to Giovanni Battista Baliani (1639)

Star, Water, Time

“Come sit by my side, Lydia, on the bank of the river.
Calmly let us watch it flow, and learn
That life passes, and we are not holding hands.
(Let us hold hands)
…..
Let us hold hands no more: why should we tire ourselves?
For our pleasure, for our pain, we pass on like the river.
'Tis better to know how to pass on silently,
With no great disquiet.”

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher

Vem sentar-te comigo, Lídia, à beira do rio.
Sossegadamente fitemos o seu curso e aprendamos
Que a vida passa, e não estamos de mãos enlaçadas.
(Enlacemos as mãos)
.....
Desenlacemos as mãos, porque não vale a pena cansarmo-nos.
Quer gozemos, quer não gozemos, passamos como o rio.
Mais vale saber passar silenciosamente
E sem desassossegos grandes.
Ricardo Reis (heteronym), ode translated by Peter Rickard.

Life, Pain, Pleasure, Learning