Quotes about river (979 quotes, page 4)

“Classical music is a perennially flowing river and nothing can affect its flow. No one needs to worry about Indian music. It is forever.”

M. Balamuralikrishna (1930–2016) Carnatic vocalist, instrumentalist and playback singer

Source: Staff Reporter, "Mangalampalli can't wait to come home".

Music

“I dash out to the banks of the river [river the 'Loup', at Cagnes, France] and find myself amongst the rushes and the reeds. I grind some pigment over all this and the wind makes their slender stalks bend and appliqués them with precision and delicacy on to my canvas, which I thus offer to quivering nature: I obtain a vegetal mark. Then it starts to rain; a fine spring rain: I expose my canvas to the rain.... and I have the mark of the rain!”

Yves Klein (1928–1962) French artist

a mark of an atmospheric event.
In 1960; p. 61
1960 -1964, "Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings"

Spring , Nature

“The French call such an anima figure a femme fatale. The sirens of the Greeks and the Lorelei of the Germans embody these dangerous aspects of the anima-in a word, destructive illusions. The following Siberian tale gives a particularly apt portrayal of such a destructive anima:
: A solitary hunter once had the experience of seeing a beautiful woman appear on the opposite bank of a river. She waved to him and sang, "Come, come. I've missed you, missed you. Now I want to put my arms around you, put my arms around you. Come, come, my nest is nearby, my nest. Come, come, lonely hunter, right now in the stillness of twilight." As he threw off his clothes and began swimming across to her, she suddenly flew away in the form of an owl, laughing mockingly. Swimming back, he drowned in the ice-cold river.
Here the anima symbolizes an unreal dream of love and happiness, of motherly love and security (the nest), an illusion that holds a man back from life. The hunter freezes to death because of his pursuit of an erotic fantasy.”

Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998) Swiss psychologist and scholar

Source: Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche (1994), The Anima as the Woman within the Man, p. 311

Love , Life , Death , Beauty

“Floating down a river named Emotion…will I make it back to shore, or drift into the unknown?”

Brandon Boyd (1976) American rock singer, writer and visual artist

Lyrics, Morning View (2001)

“Along the western slopes of the Oregon Coastal Range... come look: the hysterical crashing of tributaries as they merge into the Wakonda Auga River...”

Ken Kesey book Sometimes a Great Notion

Sometimes a Great Notion (1964) First lines

“With ordinary men the moments which are united in a close continuity out of the original discrete multiplicity are very few, and the course of their lives resembles a little brook, whereas with the genius it is more like a mighty river into which all the little rivulets flow from afar; that is to say, the universal comprehension of genius vibrates to no experience in which all the individual moments have not been gathered up and stored.”

Otto Weininger book Sex and Character

Source: Sex and Character (1903), p. 124.

Men , Universe

“I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.”

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

As I Walked Out One Evening (1937)

Love , Mountain , Star , Singing

“I 've often wish'd that I had clear,
For life, six hundred pounds a year;
A handsome house to lodge a friend;
A river at my garden's end;
A terrace walk, and half a rood
Of land set out to plant a wood.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

Imitation of Horace, book ii. Sat. 6.; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Life , Housing

“To confess to freedom, the highest habit;
while so many are courting the powerful and look from below
to the tyrants slowly crossing through the town,
longing in envy to be seen in the crowd
and to narrate their parenthood.
Better to look on in serenity:
the noise of triumph is like a polluted river.
Better to decide and to act, at the service of the ready heart
and oppose the anonymous world,
uniting the individuals ever more in the * “thou.””

Aldo Capitini (1899–1968) Italian philosopher and political activist

Hymn

World , Freedom , Heart , Envy

“"And the upshot of all this," so I have been told more than once and by more than one person, "will be simply that all you will succeed in doing will be to drive people to the wildest Catholicism." And I have been accused of being a reactionary and even a Jesuit. Be it so!… I know very well it is madness to seek to turn the waters of the river back to their source, and that it is only the ignorant who seek to find in the past a remedy for their present ills; but I know too that anyone who fights for any ideal whatever, although his ideal may seem to lie in the past, is driving the world on to the future, and that the only reactionaries are those who find themselves at home in the present. Every supposed restoration of the past is a creation of the future, and if the past which it is sought to restore is a dream, something imperfectly known, so much the better.”

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

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), Conclusion : Don Quixote in the Contemporary European Tragi-Comedy

People , Lie , World , Dreams

“As a young man, Valmiki searched through the world seeking open friendship and happiness and hope and finding none of these he went alone into the empty forest where no man lived, to as spot where the Tamasa River flows into Ganga. There he sat for years without moving, so still that white ants built an anthill over him. There Valmiki sat inside that anthill for thousands of years with only his eyes showing out, trying to find the True, his hands folded and his mind lost in contemplation.”

Vālmīki Ramayana

In p. 5.
Ramayana

Friendship , World , Hope , Search

“Time carries him as the river carries
A leaf in the downstream water.
No matter. The enchanted one insists
And shapes God with delicate geometry.
Since his illness, since his birth,
He goes on constructing God with the word.
The mightiest love was granted him
Love that does not expect to be loved.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Jorge Luis Borges, "Baruch Spinoza", as translated in Spinoza and Other Heretics, Vol. 1: The Marrano of Reason (1989) by Yirmiyahu Yovel
A - F

Love , God , Birth , Water

“There is a reciprocal action between the work of art and the viewer. The river changes the work of art and criticism can also change the artist... There are so many ideas afloat; any of them could have triggered the work of art. It is impossible to determine exactly if the idea has been transmitted by the critic, or if the work itself has determined its outcome..”

Anselm Kiefer (1945) German painter and sculptor

(1986) n.p.
Structures are no longer valid', in "Ein Gespräch..."

Art , Idea , Change

“The example of the five (daily) prayers is like that of a clear-water river flowing in front of your houses in which a person washes himself five times a day – cleansing him from all dirt.”

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

Kanzul `Ummal, Volume 7, Tradition 18931
Shi'ite Hadith

Water , Time , Housing , Personality

“Play it like something you hear down by the river.”

Edward Elgar (1857–1934) English composer

Diana M McVeagh Edward Elgar: His Life and Music (London: J. M. Dent, 1955) p. 163.
On the trio of the second movement of his Symphony No. 1.

“When Siddhartha listened attentively to this river, to the song of a thousand voices; when he did not listen to the sorrow or laughter, when he did not bind his soul to any one particular voice and absorb it in his Self, but heard them all, the whole, the unity; then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of one word: Om — perfection.”

Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) German writer

Source: Siddhartha (1922), p. 94

Soul , Laughter , Perfection

“And they told me
The times have changed
Cause' our parents had Hendrix, Janis and Jim
But what about River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain.”

River Phoenix (1970–1993) American actor, musician, and activist

War on Drugs Laughing Colors

Parent , Change , Time

“Nature does not conquer the world to God. It never has. It never will. In America, with its vast abounding wealth, its grand expanse of prairie, its reach of river, and its exuberant productiveness, there is danger that our riches will draw us away from God, and fasten us to earth; that they will make us not only rich, but mean; not only wealthy, but wicked. The grand corrective is the cross of Christ, seen in the sanctuary where the life and light of God are exhibited, and where the reverberation of the echoes from the great white throne are heard.”

Richard Salter Storrs (1821–1900) American Congregational clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 522.

Life , God , World , Nature

“The Sultan then departed from the environs of the city, in which was a temple of the Hindus. The name of this place was Maharatu-l Hind. He saw there a building of exquisite structure, which the inhabitants said had been built, not by men, but by Genii, and there he witnessed practices contrary to the nature of man, and which could not be believed but from evidence of actual sight. The wall of the city was constructed of hard stone, and two gates opened upon the river flowing under the city, which were erected upon strong and lofty foundations to protect them against the floods of the river and rains. On both sides of the city there were a thousand houses, to which idol temples were attached, all strengthened from top to bottom by rivets of iron, and all made of masonry work; and opposite to them were other buildings, supported on broad wooden pillars, to give them strength.
In the middle of the city there was a temple larger and firmer than the rest, which can neither be described nor painted. The Sultan thus wrote respecting it: - "If any should wish to construct a building equal to this, he would not be able to do it without expending an hundred thousand, thousand red dinars, and it would occupy two hundred years even though the most experienced and able workmen were employed."…
The Sultan gave orders that all the temples should be burnt with naptha and fire, and levelled with the ground.”

Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030) Sultan of Ghazni

About the capture of Mathura. Elliot and Dowson, Vol. II : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. pp. 44-45 Also quoted (in part) in Jain, Meenakshi (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts.
Quotes from Tarikh Yamini (Kitabu-l Yamini) by Al Utbi

Men , Support , Nature , Strong

“You see the rivers running east. Then you see mountains rise. Rivers run off them to the west. Mountains come up like waves. They crest, break, and spread themselves westward. When they are spent, there is an interval of time, and then again you see the rivers running eastward. You look over the shoulder of the painter and you see all that in the landscape. You see it if first you have seen it in the rock. The composition is almost infinitely less than the sum of its parts, the flickers and glimpses of a thousand million years.”

John McPhee (1931) American writer

In Suspect Terrain (1983), reprinted in Annals of the Former World (2000) page 209.

Mountain , Time , Parting

“Bewdley, as most of you know was in distant times a sanctuary town to which a man, whatever his sins, might flee and be safe from justice. So, whatever the rude waves of the outside world buffet me with more than usual vigour, I have only to remember that in Bewdley, there is sanctuary even for a Prime Minister…I have never failed to find in my own country understanding, sympathy and support, and even when life seems to most difficult and the fences in front unclimbable, I can turn back in memory and recollection to this peaceful spot by the side of the river where I first drew breath and in the memory of which I am able to draw strength. There could have been no more typical English surroundings in which to cherish the earliest memories. I remember as a child, looking up the river from the bridge into that mysterious and romantic land of Shropshire, so close to us, from which my people came only three generations before and watching the smoke of the train running along the little railway through places bearing names like Wyre Forest, Cleobury Mortimer, Neen Sollars and Tenbury - names steeped in romance and redolent of the springtime of an England long ago passed but whose heritage is ours.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Bewdley (8 August 1925), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 10-11.
1925

Life , People , World , Peace

“THE OCTOBER COUNTRY …that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain…”

Ray Bradbury book The October Country

Epigraph
The October Country (1955)

People , Autumn , Thinking , Sun

“Lovely Nymphs, ye sister Nymphs of the river Po,
And ye from out the greenwood and where the sea-waves beat,
And ye who live by fountains and on hill-tops high.”

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet

Vaghe Ninfe del Po, Ninfe sorelle,
E voi de' boschi e voi d'onda marina
E voi de' fonti e de l'alpestri cime.
Rime d'amore ("Rhymes of Love"), 175.

Love , Sister , Sea

“India whose ancient borders stretched until Afghanistan, lost with the country of seven rivers (the Indus Valley), the historical center of her civilization. At a time when the Muslim invaders seemed to have lost some of their extremism and were ready to assimilate themselves to other populations of India, the European (British) conquerors, before returning home, surrendered once more to Muslim fanaticism the cradle of Hindu civilization.”

Alain Daniélou (1907–1994) French historian, musicologist, Indologist and expert on Shaivite Hinduism

Alain Danielou, Histoire de l'Inde - Alain Danielou p. 355

Home , Time , Country

“The moonlight rolls down like a river,
The silence streams out like a sea;
And far where the eastern winds quiver,
My farewell goes floating to thee.”

Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) American anarchist writer and feminist

And Thou Too (1888)

Silence , Sea

“Although I am small, I am skilful.
From the sea and the mountain,
From the river's depth
God gives His gifts to the blessed.”

Taliesin (534–599) Welsh bard

The Tale of Taleisin

God , Mountain , Sea

“A political convention is after all not a meeting of a corporation's board of directors; it is a fiesta, a carnival, a pig-rooting, horse-snorting, band-playing, voice-screaming medieval get-together of greed, practical lust, compromised idealism, career-advancement, meeting, feud, vendetta, conciliation, of rabble-rousers, fist fights (as it used to be), embraces, drunks (again as it used to be) and collective rivers of animal sweat.”

Norman Mailer book The Presidential Papers

The Presidential Papers (1963)

Animals , Horse , Fight

“In the information age, the barriers [to entry into programming] just aren't there. The barriers are self imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don't need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers.”

John D. Carmack (1970) American computer programmer, engineer, and businessman

Quoted in David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture Chapter 16, p. 292.

Age

“Among a thousand clouds and ten thousand streams
Here lives an idle man
In the daytime wandering over green mountains
At night coming home to sleep by the cliff
Swiftly springs and autumns pass
But my mind is at peace, clear and free
By now I need nothing to lean on
To be still as the waters of the autumn river”

Han-shan Chinese monk and poet

Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry

Peace , Home , Mountain , Spring

“She floats upon the river of his thoughts.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

The Spanish Student http://www.readbookonline.net/title/3208/, Act II, sc. iii (1843).

“Handsome, strong, gay … She felt again the thro and lilt of her blood. She had loved Kameni in that moment. She loved him now. Kameni could take the place that Khay had held in her life. She thought: "We shall be happy together - yes, we shall be happy. We shall live together and take pleasure in each other and we shall have strong, handsome children. There will be busy days full of work … and days of pleasure when we sail on the River…Life will be again as I knew it with Khay…What could I ask more than that? What do I want more than that?"”

Agatha Christie book Death Comes as the End

Death Comes as the End (1945)

Love , Life , Children , Pleasure

“The pencil moved prophetic: together now men read
In the fair book of nature, and find the hope they need.
The wreath woven by the river is by the seaside worn,
And one of fate's best arrows to its due mark is borne.”

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist

Life Without and Life Within (1859), Prophecy and Fulfilment

Men , Fate , Books , Hope

“The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone here and there who thinks and feels with us, and though distant, is close to us in spirit — this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe book Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

Die Welt ist so leer, wenn man nur Berge, Flüsse und Städte darin denkt, aber hie und da jemand zu wissen, der mit uns übereinstimmt, mit dem wir auch stillschweigend fortleben, das macht uns dieses Erdenrund erst zu einem bewohnten Garten.
"Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre," in Goethes Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 7 (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1874), p. 520
Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre (Apprenticeship) (1786–1830)

World , Feeling , Mountain , Thinking

“Yoga ferried me across the great river from the bank of ignorance to the shore of knowledge and wisdom.”

B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014) Indian yoga teacher and scholar

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, P.x

Wisdom , Knowledge

“Time’s a river, Locke, and we’ve always drifted farther down it than we think.”

Scott Lynch The Lies of Locke Lamora

Interlude “Up the River” section 2 (p. 392)
The Lies of Locke Lamora (2006)

Thinking , Time

“Past the flannel plains and the blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a. m. heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscatine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.”

David Foster Wallace book The Pale King

The Pale King (2011)

Tree , Grass , Water , Past

“Certainly fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swoln, and drowns things weighty and solid.”

Francis Bacon book Essays

Of Praise
Essays (1625)

Light

“When rowan leaves are dank and rusting
And rowan berries red as blood,
When in my palm the hangman's thrusting
The final nail with bony thud,
When, over the foul flooding river,
Upon the wet grey height, I toss
Before my land's grim looks, and shiver
As I swing here upon the cross,
Then, through the blood and weeping, stretches
My dying sight to space remote;
I see upon the river’s reaches
Christ sailing to me in a boat.”

Alexander Blok (1880–1921) poet

"Autumn Love" (1907); translation from C. M. Bowra (ed.) A Book of Russian Verse (London: Macmillan, 1943) p. 99.

Christ

“Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracks. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet bears away from a choked river.”

Mervyn Peake (1911–1968) English writer, artist, poet and illustrator

Source: Gormenghast (1950), Chapter 1, section 1 (p. 399)

Bird

“Jim," she said earnestly, "if I was put down there in the middle of the night, I could find my way all over that little town; and along the river to the next town, where my grandmother lived. My feet remember all the little paths through the woods, and where the big roots stick out to trip you. I ain't never forgot my own country.”

Willa Cather book My Ántonia

Book II, Ch. 14
My Antonia (1918)

Way , Night , Country

“I would advise sitting from morning till night under some willow bush on the river bank where there is a wide view. This will be "doing the valley" far more effectively than riding along trails in constant motion from point to point. The entire valley is made up of "points of interest."”

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

"The Summer Flood of Tourists", San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin (part 1 of the 11 part series "Summering in the Sierra") dated 14 June 1875, published 22 June 1875; reprinted in John Muir: Summering in the Sierra, edited by Robert Engberg (University of Wisconsin Press, 1984) page 71
Advice for visitors to Yosemite given by John Muir at age 37 years. Compare advice given by the 74-year-old Muir below.
1870s

Night

““When he advanced from the capital of Karra, the Hindus, in alarm, descended into the earth like ants. He departed towards the garden of Behar to dye that soil with blood as red as tulip. He cleared the road to Ujjain of vile wretches, and created consternation in Bhilsan. When he effected his conquests in that country, he drew out of the river the idols which had been concealed in it.”66”

Amir Khusrow (1253–1325) Indian poet, writer, musician and scholar

About Sultan ‘Alau’d-Din Khalji (AD 1296-1316) in Vidisha (Madhya Pradesh) Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own historians, Vol. III, p. 542.ff
Miftahu'l-Futuh

Country

“One wishes to go on. On this great river one could glide forever — and here we discover the definition of bliss, salvation, Heaven, all the old Mediterranean dreams: a journey from wonder to wonder, drifting through eternity into ever-deeper, always changing grandeur, through beauty continually surpassing itself: the ultimate Homeric voyage.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

On the Colorado River, in “Down the River with Major Powell”, p. 201
The Journey Home (1977)

Beauty , Dreams , Change

“How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time! … Even so, I think there is some virtue in eagerness, whether its object prove true or false.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“June: The Alder Fork”, p. 39.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "May: Back from the Argentine," "June: The Alder Fork," "July: Great Possessions," and "July: Prairie Birthday"

Thinking , Fish , Time , Falseness

“A few years after the Constitution was adopted Alexander Hamilton said to Josiah Quincy that he thought the Union might endure for thirty years. He feared the centrifugal force of the system. The danger, he said, would proceed from the States, not from the national government. But Hamilton seems not to have considered that the vital necessity which had always united the colonies from the first New England league against the Indians, and which, in his own time, forced the people of the country from the sands of a confederacy to the rock of union, would become stronger every year and inevitably develop and confirm a nation. Whatever the intention of the fathers in 1787 might have been, whether a league or confederacy or treaty, the conclusion of the children in 1860 might have been predicted. Plant a homogeneous people along the coast of a virgin continent. Let them gradually overspread it to the farther sea, speaking the same language, virtually of the same religious faith, inter- marrying, and cherishing common heroic traditions. Suppose them sweeping from end to end of their vast domain without passports, the physical perils of their increasing extent constantly modified by science, steam, and the telegraph, making Maine and Oregon neighbors, their trade enormous, their prosperity a miracle, their commonwealth of unsurpassed importance in the world, and you may theorize as you will, but you have supposed an imperial nation, which may indeed be a power of evil as well as of good, but which can no more recede into its original elements and local sources than its own Mississippi, pouring broad and resistless into the Gulf, can turn backward to the petty forest springs and rills whence it flows. 'No, no', murmurs the mighty river, 'when you can take the blue out of the sky, when you can steal heat from fire, when you can strip splendor from the morning, then, and not before, may you reclaim your separate drops in me.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

'Yes, yes, my river,' answers the Union, 'you speak for me. I am no more a child, but a man; no longer a confederacy, but a nation. I am no more Virginia, New York, Carolina, or Massachusetts, but the United States of America'.
1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

Children , People , World , Fear

“Peronism is so much like Argentines. We Peronists, just like all Argentines, are capable of spawning the most generous actions and the most sublime individuals, as well as the most despicable actions. That’s how contradictory we are. When kidnapping was rife in this country and people were made to disappear and thrown into the river, the defenders of press freedom went AWOL.”

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (1953) Argentine politician and ex President of Argentina

Nota en Clarin 06/05/2006 http://www.clarin.com/diario/2006/05/06/um/m-01190878.htm
Unsourced, 2006

People , Freedom , Country

“Along A River-Side, I Know Not Where,
I walked one night in mystery of dream;
A chill creeps curdling yet beneath my hair,
To think what chanced me by the pallid gleam
Of a moon-wraith that waned through haunted air.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

The Washers of the Shroud http://www.bartleby.com/102/129.html, st. 1 (October 1861)

Dreams , Thinking , Chance , Night

“.. A market, a quay, a river. a gang of soldiers.... is just as good and more history than 'The cousins of Spinoza are visiting him accompanied by their mamma'. O! if I could say some time as Munkaczy: 'I painted almost everything I dreamed when I was 12 years old'. He can tell this, the man which I love as the greatest painter, whatever they may say here [in The Hague]. I hope that you once may see a true painting of me, not one of the many I shall have to make and which are [only] something, but a truly grandiose thing. All wasted fire.”

George Hendrik Breitner (1857–1923) Dutch painter and photographer

translation from the original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek
version in original Dutch (citaat van Breitner's brief, in het Nederlands:) ..Een markt een kaai een rivier. een bende soldaten.. ..is net zoo goed en meer geschiedenis dan 'De nichtjes van Spinoza komen hem bezoeken vergezeld door hunne mamma'. O! dat ik nog eens kon zeggen als Munkaczy: ik heb bijna alles geschilderd wat ik droomde toen ik 12 jaar was. dat kan hij zeggen hem die ik voor de grootste schilder hou wat ze hier ook mogen zeggen. Ik hoop dat U nog eens een waar schilderij van me moogt zien, niet een van de velen die ik zal moeten maken en ook wel iets is, maar iets waarachtigsch grootsch. Allemaal verspild vuur.
quote of Breitner in a letter to his Maecenas A.P. van Stolk, 28 March 1882; original text in RKD-Archive, The Hague https://rkd.nl/explore/excerpts/597
before 1890

Love , Dreams , Hope , History

“What colour are they now, thy quiet waters?
The evening star has brought the evening light,
And filled the river with the green hillside;
The hill-tops waver in the rippling water,
Trembles the absent vine and swells the grape
In thy clear crystal.”
Quis color ille vadis, seras cum propulit umbras<br/>Hesperus et viridi perfudit monte Mosellam!<br/>tota natant crispis iuga motibus et tremit absens<br/>pampinus et vitreis vindemia turget in undis.

Ausonius Mosella

Quis color ille vadis, seras cum propulit umbras
Hesperus et viridi perfudit monte Mosellam!
tota natant crispis iuga motibus et tremit absens
pampinus et vitreis vindemia turget in undis.
"Mosella", line 192; translation from Helen Waddell Mediaeval Latin Lyrics ([1929] 1943) p. 31.

Star , Light , Water

“An examination of our terms, such as competition, rivalry, emulation, etc., reveals that the traditional perspective remains inscribed in the language. Competitors are fundamentally those who run or walk together, rivals who dwell on opposite banks of the same river, etc…The modern view of competition and conflict is the unusual and exceptional view, and our incomprehension is perhaps more problematic than the phenomenon of primitive prohibition. Primitive societies have never shared our conception of violence. For us, violence has a conceptual autonomy, a specificity that is utterly unknown to primitive societies. We tend to focus on the individual act, whereas primitive societies attach only limited importance to it and have essentially pragmatic reasons for refusing to isolate such an act from its context. This context is one of violence. What permits us to conceive abstractly of an act of violence and view it as an isolated crime is the power of a judicial institution that transcends all antagonists. If the transcendence of the judicial institution is no longer there, if the institution loses its efficacy or becomes incapable of commanding respect, the imitative and repetitious character of violence becomes manifest once more; the imitative character of violence is in fact most manifest in explicit violence, where it acquires a formal perfection it had not previously possessed. At the level of the blood feud, in fact, there is always only one act, murder, which is performed in the same way for the same reasons in vengeful imitation of the preceding murder. And this imitation propagates itself by degrees. It becomes a duty for distant relatives who had nothing to do with the original act, if in fact an original act can be identified; it surpasses limits in space and time and leaves destruction everywhere in its wake; it moves from generation to generation. In such cases, in its perfection and paroxysm mimesis becomes a chain reaction of vengeance, in which human beings are constrained to the monotonous repetition of homicide. Vengeance turns them into doubles.”

René Girard book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

Source: Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), p. 11-12.

Way , Distant , Time , Perfection

“Nature is vast, deep, high, intelligent, infinite and eternal. The heaven appearing before us is only this bright, shining mass; but in its immeasurable extent, the sun, the moon, stars and constellations are suspended in it, and all things are embraced under it. The earth, appearing before us, is but a handful of soil; but in all its breadth and depth, it sustains mighty mountains without feeling their weight; rivers and seas dash against it without causing it to leak. The mountain appearing before us is only a mass of rock; but in all the vastness of its size, grass and vegetation grow upon it, birds and beasts dwell on it, and treasures of precious minerals are found in it. The water appearing before us is but a ladleful of liquid; but in all its unfathomable depths, the largest crustaceans, dragons, fishes, and turtles are produced in them, and all useful products abound in them.
In the Book of Songs it is said: "The ordinance of God, / How inscrutable it is and goes on for ever."”

Zisi (-481–-402 BC) Chinese philosopher

That is to say, this is the essence of God.
Source: The Doctrine of the Mean, pp. 125–126

God , Books , Feeling , Mountain

“Here's to you, men I never met,
Yet hope to meet behind the veil,
Thronged on some starry parapet,
That looks down upon Innisfail,
And sees the confluence of dreams
That clashed together in our night,
One river, born from many streams,
Roll in one blaze of blinding light.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

To the Memory of Some I knew Who are Dead and Who Loved Ireland (1917)

Men , Dreams , Hope , Light

“In fact, the Lokayata operated and developed as a tradition of universal criticism or negativism, without caring to evolve a durable or regular life-order, a socio-cultural order, of its own, with the result that it failed to commend itself to society at large. No wonder that a branch of the Lokayata, the Nilapata school, so called because its members dressed in blue, were responsible for inception of what may be called an inculture, a tradition of wanton living, about which it is said:…That is: ‘How can the Nilapata feel happy till rivers begins to overflow with wine, the mountains are made of meat, and the world is full of women?”

Charvaka An unorthodox school of Hindu philosophy

Harsh Narain, Myths of Composite Culture and Equality of Religions (1990) (quoting Puratanaprabandhasangraha)

Life , Women , World , School

“The earliest stratified rocks contain no matters which are not to be found in the primitive granite. They are the same in material, but only changed into new forms and combinations; hence they have been called by Mr. Lyell, metamorphic rocks. But how comes it that some of them are composed almost exclusively of one of the materials of granite; the mica schists, for example, of mica—the quartz rocks, of quartz, &c.? For this there are both chemical and mechanical causes. Suppose that a river has a certain quantity of material to carry down, it is evident that it will soonest drop the larger particles, and carry the lightest farthest on. To such a cause is it owing that some of the materials of the worn-down granite have settled in one place and some in another. Again, some of these materials must be presumed to have been in a state of chemical solution in the primeval seas. It would be, of course, in conformity with chemical laws, that certain of these materials would be precipitated singly, or in modified combinations, to the bottom, so as to form rocks by themselves.”

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 51-52

Law , Change , Sea

“Do you recall that night in June
Upon the Danube River;
We listened to the ländler-tune,
We watched the moonbeams quiver.”

Charles Hamilton Aide (1826–1906) French writer

The Danube River, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Night

“The Mississippi Delta was shining like a National guitar,
I am following the river down the highway
Through the cradle of the Civil War.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

Graceland
Song lyrics, Graceland (1986)

War

“The whole landscape lies behind the transparent gauze of the fog that now rises, drawn upwards by the sun, and as it rises, reveals the silver-spangled river, the fields, the cottages, the further scene. At last one can discern all that one could only guess at before... The sun is up! There is a peasant at the end of the field, with his wagon drawn by a yoke of oxen... Everything is bursting into life, sparkling in the full light – light, which as yet is still soft and golden. The background, simple in line and harmonious in colour, melts into the infinite expanse of sky, through the bluish, misty atmosphere. The flowers raise their heads the birds flutter hither and thither... The little rounded willows on the bank of the stream look like birds spreading their tails. It's adorable! And one paints! And paints!”

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) French landscape painter and printmaker in etching

Corot's description of a morning in Switzerland, Château de Gruyères, 1857, as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963
1850s

Life , Flowers , Bird , Light

“For property is robbery, but then, we are all robbers or would-be robbers together, and have found it essential to organise our thieving, as we have found it necessary to organise our lust and our revenge. Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Source: Erewhon (1872), Ch. 12

Marriage , Law , Revenge

“We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not the stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.”

Norbert Wiener book The Human Use of Human Beings

V. Organization as the Message. p. 96
The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)

Water

“Nowadays everyone lives selfishly and seeks only the leisure in which to indulge his own desires. They look on all the beauties of nature-the rivers and mountains, the breeze and the moon-as their own to enjoy, forgetting what the shrine of the Sun Goddess stands for. The common man thinks of his life as his own and refuses to perform his duty to his lord. The samurai regards his household as his own private possession and refuses to sacrifice his life for his state. The feudal lords regard their domains as their own and refuse to serve King and Country. Unwilling to serve King and Country, at home they cherish only the objects of desire and abroad they willingly yield to the foreign barbarian, inviting defeat and destruction. Thus the scenic beauties they enjoy will not long remain in their possession.”

Yoshida Shoin (1830–1859) Japanese politician

Vol. IV.
Yoshida Shoin Zenshu

Life , Beauty , Home , Mountain

“Who publishes the sheet-music of the winds, or the written music of water written in river-lines?”

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

August 1875, page 220
John of the Mountains, 1938

Music , Water

“Ah, they tell me that the river's too deep
And it's much too wide for you can't get across to the other side.
But they don't know I've got to get there and hold her in my arms
Just a one more time like I did before when she was mine all mine.
Cause I can hear her saying (come to me baby)
I'm going away.
I'm going to stay.
I'm gonna get to you, no matter what I have to do.”

Smokey Robinson (1940) American R&B singer-songwriter and record producer

Way Over There, written by Smokey Robinson and Berry Gordy, Jr. (1960)
Song lyrics, With The Miracles

Time , Baby

“You drown not by falling into a river, but by staying submerged in it.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

As quoted in Publishing Tips : Weekly Strategies for the Independent Writer‎ (2008) by Linda A. Lavid, p. 57.

“Consciousness, thoughts, are traveling through space in your head; we are traveling through space on this beautiful biosphere, Earth. If consciousness can traverse inner space, then perhaps it can traverse outer space. Perhaps we are as connected by consciousness as we are by the air that we all breathe. The air we inhale through the holes in our faces which tumbles into our lungs and blood, which travels through our hearts, which forms the words we speak, the air which we exhale, which is connected to all air, an unbroken entity, like all the water in all the rivers in the world, leading to the sea, touching one another.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

World , Beauty , Travel , Water

“If we sell you land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred and that the ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells us events and memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father. The rivers are our brothers, they quench our thirst. The rivers carry our cannoes, feed our children. If we sell our land, you must learn, and teach your children, that the rivers are our brothers, and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness you would give any brother.”

Chief Seattle (1786–1866) Duwamish chief

Misattributed

Life , Children , People , Learning

“Pesotsky had an immense house with columns and lions, off which the stucco was peeling, and with a footman in swallow-tails at the entrance. The old park, laid out in the English style, gloomy and severe, stretched for almost three-quarters of a mile to the river, and there ended in a steep, precipitous clay bank, where pines grew with bare roots that looked like shaggy paws; the water shone below with an unfriendly gleam, and the peewits flew up with a plaintive cry, and there one always felt that one must sit down and write a ballad.”

Anton Chekhov book The Black Monk

The Black Monk (1894)

Water , Housing , Cry

“Fire on anything that moves on the river.”

Kingoro Hashimoto (1890–1957) officer of Imperial Japanese Army and politician

Quoted in "Yangtze Patrol: The U.S. Navy in China" - Page 251 - by Kemp Tolley - History - 2000

“England's improvement by sea and land. To outdo the Dutch without fighting. To pay debts without moneys. To set at work all the poor of England with the growth of our own lands. To prevent unnecessary suits of law; with the benefit of a voluntary register. Directions where vast quantities of timber are to be had for the building of ships, with the advantage of making the great rivers of England navigable. Rules to prevent fires in London, and other great cities; with directions how the several companies of handicraftsmen in London may always have cheap bread and drink. By Andrew Yarranton, Gent. London, printed for the author, &c., 1677.”

Andrew Yarranton (1619–1684) English civil engineer

Full title cited in Patrick Edward Dove (1854, p. 403)
Quotes from England's Improvement, (1677)

Money , Law , Drink , Fight

“Flour shipped from the Mississippi River to Havana can pass by the very entrance to the city on its way to a port in Spain, there pay a duty fixed upon articles to be reexported, transferred to a Spanish vessel and brought back almost to the point of starting, paying a second duty, and still leave a profit over what would be received by direct shipment. All that is produced in Cuba could be produced in Santo Domingo. Being a part of the United States, commerce between the island and mainland would be free. There would be no export duties on her shipments nor import duties on those coming here.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

1870s, Eighth State of the Union Address (1876)

Way , Parting

“We measure the earth, sun, stars, and ocean depths. We burrow into the depths of the earth for gold. We search for rivers and mountains on the moon. We discover new stars and know their magnitudes. We sound the depths of gorges and build clever machines. Each day brings a new invention. What don’t we think of! What can’t we do! But there is something else, the most important thing of all, that we are missing. We do not know exactly what it is. We are like a small child who knows he does not feel well but cannot explain why. We are uneasy, because we know a lot of superfluous facts; but we do not know what is really important—ourselves.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: Path of Life (1909), p. 10

Feeling , Search , Mountain , Star

“[But ultimately the brunt of all such riots was borne by the Hindus. For instance, this is how Pelsaert describes the situation prevalent in the time of Jahangir (1605-27) during Muharram. ] “The outcry (of mourning) lasts till the first quarter of the day; the coffins (Tazias) are brought to the river, and if the two parties meet carrying their biers (it is worse on that day), and one will not give place to the other, then if they are evenly matched, they may kill each other as if they were enemies at open war, for they run with naked swords like madmen. No Hindu can venture into the streets before midday, for even if they should escape with their life, at the least their arms and legs would be broken to pieces…””

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

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

Life , War , Time

“Jumped in the river, what did I see?
Black-eyed angels swam with me
A moonful of stars and astral cars
And all the figures I used to see
All my lovers were there with me
All my past and futures
And we all went to heaven in a little row boat
There was nothing to fear and nothing to doubt”

Thom Yorke (1968) English musician, philanthropist and singer-songwriter

"Pyramid Song"
Lyrics, Amnesiac (2001)

Fear , Angels , Cars , Star

“She got up, grew her legs longer to get her body out of the water and shook herself dry. Then she wandered off, following a zigzag path along the border between Life and Death, her tail wagging so hard, the tip of it beat the river into a froth behind her.”

Garth Nix (1963) Australian fantasy writer

Source: Old Kingdom series (The Abhorsen Trilogy), Abhorsen (2003), p. 395.

Life , Death , Water

“Where was the beauty that the Lord gave man when first he towered in pride?
But one came by me at whose word the bitter condemnation died.
His brows were crowned with thorns of light: his eyes were bright as one who sees
The starry palaces shine o'er the sparkle of the heavenly seas.
'Is it not beautiful?' he cried. Our Faery Land of Hearts' Desire
Is mingled through the mire and mist, yet stainless keeps its lovely fire.
The pearly phantoms with blown hair are dancing where the drunkards reel:
The cloud frail daffodils shine out where filth is splashing from the heel.
O sweet, and sweet, and sweet to hear, the melodies in rivers run:
The rapture of their crowded notes is yet the myriad voice of One.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

By Still Waters (1906)

Love , Beauty , Light , Heart

“In the middle of the night
I go walking in my sleep
Through the valley of fear
To a river so deep.
And I've been searching for something
Taken out of my soul
Something I would never lose
Something somebody stole.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

The River of Dreams.
Song lyrics, River of Dreams (1993)

Fear , Soul , Search , Sleep

“The same polarity of the male and female principle exists in nature; not only, as is obvious in animals and plants, but in the polarity of the two fundamental functions, that of receiving and penetrating. It is the polarity of earth and rain, of the river and the ocean, of night and day, of darkness and light, of matter and spirit.”

Erich Fromm book The Art of Loving

Source: The Art of Loving (1956), Ch. 2

Nature , Light , Animals , Night

“If in the nineteenth century most scholars identified the Ghaggar-Hakra's course with the Vedic Sarasvati, it is basically for three reasons. The Rig-Veda, the oldest of the four Vedas, mentions various rivers but praises the Sarasvati above all others: it was a "mighty river" flowing "from the mountain to the sea", and one hymn listed it between the Yamuna and the Sutlej - precisely the location of the Ghaggar-Hakra. Secondly, the local traditions regarding the "lost river" of the Indian desert matched those in the post-Vedic literature (including the Mahabharata), which recorded the gradual disappearance of the Sarasvati. Thirdly, scholars noticed a minor tributary of the Ghaggar called "Sarsuti", an obvious corruption of "Sarasvati": it rises in the Sirmur hills that are part of the Shivaliks and was marked on British maps as early as in 1788. Putting these three lines of evidence together, they concluded that the lost Sarasvati could only have flowed in the Ghaggar's bed.”

Michel Danino (1956) Indian writer

Supporting the claim that Ghaggar-Hakra is the Sarasvati river, as quoted in " Sarasvati: Tracing the death of a river http://www.dnaindia.com/blogs/post-sarasvati-tracing-the-death-of-a-river-1581502" DNA India (12 June 2010)

Mountain , Literature , Parting , Sea

“When I reached the [Yosemite] valley, all the rocks seemed talkative, and more lovable than ever. They are dear friends, and have warm blood gushing through their granite flesh; and I love them with a love intensified by long and close companionship. … I … bathed in the bright river, sauntered over the meadows, conversed with the domes, and played with the pines.”

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

letter to Mrs. Ezra S. Carr (December 1872); published as " A Geologist's Winter Walk http://books.google.com/books?id=OAEbAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA355", Overland Monthly, volume 10, number 4 (April 1873) pages 355-358 (at page 355); modified slightly and reprinted in Steep Trails (1918), chapter 2
1870s

Love

“One of the most popular superstitions consists in the belief that every man is endowed with definite qualities—that some men are kind, some wicked; some wise, some foolish; some energetic, some apathetic, etc. This is not true. We may say of a man that he is oftener kind than wicked; oftener wise than foolish; oftener energetic than apathetic, and vice versa. But it would not be true to say of one man that he is always kind or wise, and of another that he is always wicked or foolish. And yet we thus divide people. This is erroneous. Men are like rivers—the water in all of them, and at every point, is the same, but every one of them is now narrow, now swift, now wide, now calm, now clear, now cold, now muddy, now warm. So it is with men. Every man bears within him the germs of all human qualities, sometimes manifesting one quality, sometimes another; and often does not resemble himself at all, manifesting no change. With some people these changes are particularly sharp. And to this class Nekhludoff belonged.”

Leo Tolstoy book Resurrection

Source: Resurrection (1899), Ch. 57

Men , People , Water , Change

“My birthplace was California, but I couldn't forget Armenia, so what is one's country? Is it land of the earth, in a specific place? Rivers there? Lakes? The sky there? The way the moon comes up there? And the sun? Is one's country the trees, the vineyards, the grass, the birds, the rocks, the hills and summer and winter? Is it the animal rhythm of the living there? The huts and houses, the streets of cities, the tables and chairs, and the drinking of tea and talking? Is it the peach ripening in summer heat on the bough? Is it the dead in the earth there?”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

Inhale and Exhale (1936), Antranik and the Spirit of Armenia

Way , Drink , Bird , Tree

“A Delaware Indian prophet appeared [1762] in Michigan and preached a doctrine that he said had been revealed to him in a vision. He called for the cessation of strife by Indian against Indian, and a holy war against the Whites… finally a practical man, an Algonkian named Pontiac, arose to lead them. He formed a confederation and attacked English forts all along the Great Lakes until he was ambushed and his forces utterly defeated. …Forty years later the Shawnee Prophet … twin brother of Chief Tecumseh, repeated the promises of the Delaware Prophet… Tecumseh established the greatest Indian alliance that ever existed north of Mexico. He and his emissaries visited almost every band, tribe, and chiefdom from the headwaters of the Missouri River in the Rocky Mountains to as far south and east as Florida. Indians everywhere were arming themselves for the right moment to attack the Whites when, in 1811, Tecumseh's brother, the Shawnee Prophet, launched a premature attack at Tippecanoe… the Indians were defeated by General William Henry Harrison… Tecumseh rallied his remaining forces and joined the British in the War of 1812. He fought bravely in battle after battle, but in 1813 his 2,500 warriors from the allied tribes were defeated decisively, once again by General Harrison.”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

War , Mountain , Decision , Appearance

“In the very first year of his reign, he [Jahangir] tortured Guru Arjun Dev to death. His contempt for Hindus comes out clearly in his Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri: “A Hindu named Arjun lived in Govindwal on the bank of river Beas in the garb of a saint and in ostentation. From all sides cowboys and idiots became his fast followers. The business had flourished for three or four generations. For a long time it had been in my mind to put a stop to this dukan-e-batil (mart of falsehood) or to bring him into the fold of Islam.” According to other accounts, he asked the Guru to include some surahs of the Quran in the adi Grantha, which the Guru refused to do. In the eighth year of his reign, he destroyed the temple of Bhagwat at Ajmer. He persecuted the Jains in Gujarat, and ordered that Jain monks should not be seen in his kingdom on pain of death. Finally, he sent Murtaza Khan to Kangra for reducing that city of temples. The siege lasted for 20 months at the end of which he himself went to Kangra for slaughtering cows in that sacred place of Hindus, and building a mosque where none had existed before.”

Jahangir (1569–1627) 4th Mughal Emperor

Goel, S. R. (2001). The story of Islamic imperialism in India.

Death , Pain , Business , Time

“Got a wife and kids in Baltimore Jack;
I went out for a ride and I never went back.
Like a river that don't know where it's flowing,
I took a wrong turn and I just kept going”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Hungry Heart"
Song lyrics, The River (1980)

“I first read his book Orthodoxy at a time when I was living on a sailboat in a quiet creek off the Potomac River right after college graduation. He seemed to view faith as a romantic adventure and the universe as a wild fairy tale. Chesterton looks at the world in the most beautiful way. He was also a journalist and philosopher who wrote an essay on “The Tyranny of Bad Journalism.” He died long before online video, but I think he would advocate new, creative methods to revolutionize the practice of journalism.”

James O'Keefe (1984) American conservative filmmaker

Changing the World by the Time He’s 30 http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/changing_the_world_by_the_time_hes_30 (March 31, 2010)

Books , World , Faith , Beauty

“Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Page 3
A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)

Life , Fate , Mountain , Time

“I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Books
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Books , Thinking , Reading

“The sudden swelling of the rivers, and the absence of the King with his army, gave Venkutputty leisure to muster the whole of his forces, which amounted to one hundred thousand men. The leaders were Yeltumraj, Goolrung Setty, and Munoopraj, who marched to recover Gundicota from the hands of Sunjur Khan. Here the enemy were daily opposed by sallies from the garrison, but they perservered in the siege; when they heard that Moortuza Khan, with the main army of the Mahomedans, had pentrated as far as the city of Krupa, the most famous city of that country, wherein was a large temple. This edifice the Mahomedans destroyed as far as practicable, broke the idol, and sacked the city…”

Firishta (1560–1620) Indian historian

Sultãn Muhammad Qulî Qutb Shãh of Golconda (AD 1580-1612) Cuddapah (Andhra Pradesh)
Tãrîkh-i-Firishta

Men , Country

“Home was a dream she’d had yesterday. A place where children used to play. Among towers near the mountains, by a river, on curving sweeps of white or golden sand beside a palace at the edge of the sea.”

Guy Gavriel Kay book Tigana

Source: Tigana (1990), Chapter 8 (p. 225)

Children , Dreams , Home , Mountain

“I drive from home to my office, a small apartment on the river in the center of Dublin. I write there from 9 a. m. to lunchtime, I take a simple lunch—bread, cheese, nice cup of tea—work until 6 p. m., then home for dinner. Viewed from outside my head it is a singularly dull and uneventful day, but inside my head … aaah.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

How I Write: John Banville on ‘Ancient Light,’ Nabokov, and Dublin (2012)

Home , Tea

“Lincoln had a wonderful faculty for understanding the topography of a country, and he was quite familiar with the one in which the army was about to operate; he carried a small chart in his pocket, on which were marked all the rivers and hills about Richmond, with the city itself, and the different points where General Lee had his forces posted, the lines of defense, and, in fact, all the information that a general of an army wanted. During our rides which were always within the lines he would stop and spread out his chart on his knees and point out to me what he would do if he were the general commanding, taking good care, at the same time, never to interfere in any way with General Grant, whom, I rather think, he considered the better strategist of the two.”

David Dixon Porter (1813–1891) United States Navy admiral

Source: 1880s, Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War (1885), p. 282

Way , Understanding , Thinking , Time

“At Posada, Calugareni, on the Olt, jiu and. Cerna rivers, at Turda; in the mountains of the unhappy and forgotten Moti of Vidra, all the way to Huedin and Alba-Iulia (the torture place of Horia and his brothers-in-arms), there are everywhere testimonies of battles and tombs of heroes. All over the Carpathians, from the Oltenian mountains at Dragoslavele and at Predeal, from Oituz to Vatra Dornei, on peaks and in valley bottoms, everywhere Romanian blood flowed like rivers. In the middle of the night, in difficult times for our people, we hear the call of the Romanian soil urging us to battle. I ask and I expect an answer: By what right do the Jews wish to take this land from us? On what historical argument do they base their pretensions and particularly the audacity with which they defy us Romanians, here in our own land? We are bound to this land by millions of tombs and millions of unseen threads that only our soul feels, and woe to those who shall try to snatch us from it.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Jewish Problem

People , Way , Feeling , Soul

“When you were a child, I loved you. I loved your grave face and the confidence with which you came to me, asking me to mend your broken toys. And then, after eight years' absence, you came again and sat here, and brought me the thoughts that were in your mind. And your mind, Renisenb, is not like the minds of the rest of your family. It does not turn in upon itself, seeking to encase itself in narrow walls. Your mind is like my mind, it looks over the River, seeing a world of changes, of new ideas - seeing a world where all things are possible to those with courage and vision…”

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) English mystery and detective writer

Hori
(1945)

Love , World , Family , Confidence

“Love is like some fresh spring, that leaves its cresses, its gravel bed and flowers to become first a stream and then a river, changing its aspect and its nature as it flows to plunge itself in some boundless ocean, where restricted natures only find monotony, but where great souls are engulfed in endless contemplation.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

L'amour est une source naïve, partie de son lit de cresson, de fleurs, de gravier, qui rivière, qui fleuve, change de nature et d'aspect à chaque flot, et se jette dans un incommensurable océan où les esprits incomplets voient la monotonie, où les grandes âmes s'abîment en de perpétuelles contemplations.
The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831), Part II: A Woman Without a Heart

Love , Soul , Spring , Flowers