Quotes about stream

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

Quotes about stream

“Parents wonder why the streams are bitter, when they themselves poison the fountain.”

John Locke (1632–1704) English philosopher and physician

“A man standing by a spring of clear, sweet water and cursing it. While the fresh water keeps on bubbling up. He can shovel mud into it, or dung, and the stream will carry it away, wash itself clean, remain unstained.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Hays translation
Suppose that men kill thee, cut thee in pieces, curse thee. What then can these things do to prevent thy mind from remaining pure, wise, sober, just? For instance, if a man should stand by a limpid pure spring, and curse it, the spring never ceases sending up potable water; and if he should cast clay into it or filth, it will speedily disperse them and wash them out, and will not be at all polluted. How then shalt thou possess a perpetual fountain? By forming thyself hourly to freedom conjoined with contentment, simplicity and modesty.
VIII, 51
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book VIII

Spring, Water

“One type of paradise that is portrayed for mankind is streams, beautiful nymphs and greeneries. But there is another kind of paradise. ... The warfront was the lost paradise of the human beings, indeed.”

Qasem Soleimani (1957–2020) Iranian senior military officer

In a 2009 interview Quoted in "Soleimani, a General Who Became Iran Icon by Targeting US" https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/01/02/world/middleeast/ap-ml-iran-qassem-soleimani.html. The Associated Press

Beauty

“No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.”

Friedrich Nietzsche Untimely Meditations

Niemand kann dir die Brücke bauen, auf der gerade du über den Fluß des Lebens schreiten mußt, niemand außer dir allein.
“Schopenhauer as educator,” § 3.1, R. Hollingdale, trans. (1983), p. 129
Untimely Meditations (1876)

Courageous, Life

“It is when we are trapped in incessant streams of compulsive thinking that the universe really disintegrates for us, and we lose the ability to sense the interconnectedness of all that exists.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Source: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

Thinking, Sense, Universe

“Arguments for preservation based on the beauty of wilderness are sometimes treated as if they were of little weight because they are "merely aesthetic". That is a mistake. We go to great lengths to preserve the artistic treasures of earlier human civilisations. It is difficult to imagine any economic gain that we would be prepared to accept as adequate compensation for, for instance, the destruction of the paintings in the Louvre. How should we compare the aesthetic value of wilderness with that of the paintings in the Louvre? Here, perhaps, judgment does become inescapably subjective; so I shall report my own experiences. I have looked at the paintings in the Louvre, and in many of the other great galleries of Europe and the United States. I think I have a reasonable sense of appreciation of the fine arts; yet I have not had, in any museum, experiences that have filled my aesthetic senses in the way that they are filled when I walk in a natural setting and pause to survey the view from a rocky peak overlooking a forested valley, or by a stream tumbling over moss-covered boulders set amongst tall tree-ferns, growing in the shade of the forest canopy, I do not think I am alone in this; for many people, wilderness is the source of the greatest feelings of aesthetic appreciation, rising to an almost mystical intensity.”

Peter Singer book Practical Ethics

Source: Practical Ethics

People, Beauty, Art, Way

“Across the silent stream
Where the dream-shadows go,
From the dim blue Hill of Dream
I have heard the west wind blow.”

William Sharp (writer) (1855–1905) Scottish writer

From the Hills of Dream, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Dreams

“The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"Some Thoughts on the Common Toad," Tribune (12 April 1946, page 10, last paragraph http://archive.tribunemagazine.co.uk/page/12th-april-1946/10)

Sun

“If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Harvard University address (1978)

Life, Money, World, Way

“In contrast to the flux and muddle of life, art is clarity and enduring presence. In the stream of life, few things are perceived clearly because few things stay put. Every mood or emotion is mixed or diluted by contrary and extraneous elements. The clarity of art—the precise evocation of mood in the novel, or of summer twilight in a painting—is like waking to a bright landscape after a long fitful slumber, or the fragrance of chicken soup after a week of head cold.”

Yi-Fu Tuan (1930) Chinese-American geographer

Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature, and Culture, ch. 10 (1993).

Life, Art, Mood, Summer

“I despise your religious festivals;
your assemblies are a stench to me.
Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,
I will have no regard for them.
Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.
But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream!”

Amos (prophet) Hebrew prophet

5:21-24 NIV
Book of Amos

Justice, Music

“He is the Ultimate Rest unbounded: He has spread His form of love throughout all the world.
From that Ray which is Truth, streams of new forms are perpetually springing: and He pervades those forms.”

Kabir (1440–1518) Indian mystic poet

Songs of Kabîr (1915)

Love, Truth, World, Spring

“Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Gitanjali http://www.spiritualbee.com/gitanjali-poems-of-tagore/ (1912) Context: Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high Where knowledge is free Where the world has not been broken up into fragments By narrow domestic walls Where words come out from the depth of truth Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit Where the mind is led forward by thee Into ever-widening thought and action Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Way, Freedom, Dead, Country

“Is all our Life, then, but a dream
Seen faintly in the golden gleam
Athwart Time's dark resistless stream?”

Lewis Carroll book Sylvie and Bruno

Sylvie and Bruno (1889)
Context: p>Is all our Life, then, but a dream
Seen faintly in the golden gleam
Athwart Time's dark resistless stream?Bowed to the earth with bitter woe
Or laughing at some raree-show
We flutter idly to and fro.Man's little Day in haste we spend,
And, from its merry noontide, send
No glance to meet the silent end.</p

Life, Dreams, Time

“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

“One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Sea

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Fish, Time

“In streams of light I clearly saw
The dust you seldom see,
Out of which the Nameless makes
A Name for one like me…
All busy in the sunlight
The flecks did float and dance,
And I was tumbled up with them
In formless circumstance.”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

Business, Light, Dance

“The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.”

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

Section VIII: “Monopoly, or Opportunity?”, p. 117 http://books.google.com/books?id=rxC4IG60KTwC&pg=PA177&dq=%22man+who+is+swimming%22 1910s, The New Freedom (1913)

“Rivers, ponds, lakes and streams — they all have different names, but they all contain water. Just as religions do — they all contain truths”

Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist

Source: Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times

Truth, Religion, Water

“Down a path worn into the woods, past a stream and a hollowed-out log full of pill bugs and termites, was a glass coffin. It rested right on the ground, and in it slept a boy with horns on his head and ears as pointed as knives.”

Holly Black book The Darkest Part of the Forest

Source: The Darkest Part of the Forest

Boy, Past

“In a Wonderland they lie, Dreaming as the days go by, Dreaming as the summers die:
Ever drifting down the stream- Lingering in the golden gleam- Life, what is it but a dream?”

Lewis Carroll book Through the Looking-Glass

Source: Through the Looking Glass

Life, Lie, Dreams, Summer

“We two have paddled in the stream,
from morning sun till dine;
But seas between us broad have roared
since days of long ago.”

Robert Burns (1759–1796) Scottish poet and lyricist

Sun, Sea

“However—the crucial thing is my lack of interest in ordinary life. No one ever wrote a story yet without some real emotional drive behind it—and I have not that drive except where violations of the natural order… defiances and evasions of time, space, and cosmic law… are concerned. Just why this is so I haven't the slightest idea—it simply is so. I am interested only in broad pageants—historic streams—orders of biological, chemical, physical, and astronomical organisation—and the only conflict which has any deep emotional significance to me is that of the principle of freedom or irregularity or adventurous opportunity against the eternal and maddening rigidity of cosmic law… especially the laws of time…. Hence the type of thing I try to write. Naturally, I am aware that this forms a very limited special field so far as mankind en masse is concerned; but I believe (as pointed out in that Recluse article) that the field is an authentic one despite its subordinate nature. This protest against natural law, and tendency to weave visions of escape from orderly nature, are characteristic and eternal factors in human psychology, even though very small ones. They exist as permanent realities, and have always expressed themselves in a typical form of art from the earliest fireside folk tales and ballads to the latest achievements of Blackwood and Machen or de la Mare or Dunsany. That art exists—whether the majority like it or not. It is small and limited, but real—and there is no reason why its practitioners should be ashamed of it. Naturally one would rather be a broad artist with power to evoke beauty from every phase of experience—but when one unmistakably isn't such an artist, there's no sense in bluffing and faking and pretending that one is.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to E. Hoffmann Price (15 August 1934) , quoted in Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters edited by S.T. Joshi, p. 268
Non-Fiction, Letters, to E. Hoffmann Price

Life, Law, Beauty, Art

“Yes, from the mountain of eternity we shall look down, and behold the whole plain spread before us. Down here we get lost and confused in the devious valleys that run off from the rdots of the hills everywhere, and we cannot make out where the streams are going, and what there is behind that low shoulder of the hill yonder. But when we get to the summit peak and look down, it will all shape itself into one consistent whole, and we shall see it all at once.
None can comprehend eternity but the eternal God.”

Thomas Boston (1676–1732) Scottish church leader, theologian and philosopher

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 212.
Secondary Sources

God, Mountain

“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

“Blood will stream over Europe until the nations become aware of the frightful madness which drives them in circles. And then, struck by celestial music and made gentle, they approach their former altars all together, hear about the works of peace, and hold a great celebration of peace with fervent tears before the smoking altars.”

Novalis (1772–1801) German poet and writer

As quoted in the Fourth Leaflet of the White Rose (1942)

Peace, Music, Tear, Madness

“As I conclude I reflect on my childhood experience when I would visit a stream next to our home to fetch water for my mother. I would drink water straight from the stream. Playing among the arrowroot leaves I tried in vain to pick up the strands of frogs’ eggs, believing they were beads. But every time I put my little fingers under them they would break. Later, I saw thousands of tadpoles: black, energetic and wriggling through the clear water against the background of the brown earth. This is the world I inherited from my parents. Today, over 50 years later, the stream has dried up, women walk long distances for water, which is not always clean, and children will never know what they have lost. The challenge is to restore the home of the tadpoles and give back to our children a world of beauty and wonder.”

Wangari Maathai (1940–2011) Kenyan environmental and political activist

Nobel lecture http://nobelprize.org/peace/laureates/2004/maathai-lecture.html (10 December 2004)

Women, Children, World, Beauty

“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

“The past was real. The present, all about me, was unreal, unnatural, repellent. I saw the big ships lying in the stream… the home of hardship and hopelessness; the boats passing to and fro; the cries of the sailors at the capstan or falls; the peopled beach; the large hide houses, with their gangs of men; and the Kanakas interspersed everywhere. All, all were gone! Not a vestige to mark where one hide house stood. The oven, too, was gone. I searched for its site, and found, where I thought it should be, a few broken bricks and bits of mortar. I alone was left of all, and how strangely was I here! What changes to me! Where were they all? Why should I care for them — poor Kanakas and sailors, the refuse of civilization, the outlaws and the beachcombers of the Pacific! Time and death seemed to transfigure them. Doubtless nearly all were dead; but how had they died, and where? In hospitals, in fever climes, in dens of vice, or falling from the mast, or dropping exhausted from the wreck "When for a moment, like a drop of rain/He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan/Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown." The lighthearted boys are now hardened middle-aged men, if the seas, rocks, fevers, and the deadlier enemies that beset a sailor's life on shore have spared them; and the then strong men have bowed themselves, and the earth or sea has covered them. How softening is the effect of time! It touches us through the affections. I almost feel as if I were lamenting the passing away of something loved and dear — the boats, the Kanakas, the hides, my old shipmates! Death, change, distance, lend them a character which makes them quite another thing.”

Richard Henry Dana Jr. (1815–1882) United States author and lawyer

Twenty-Four Years After (1869)

Love, Life, Death, Men

“I do differ from you radically in respect to familiar things & scenes; for I always demand close correlation with the landscape & historic stream to which I belong, & would feel completely lost in infinity without a system of reference-points based on known & accustomed objects. I take complete relativity so much for granted, that I cannot conceive of anything as existing in itself in any recognisable form. What gives things an aspect & quasi-significance to us is the fact that we view things consistently from a certain artificial & fortuitous angle. Without the preservation of that angle, coherent consciousness & entity itself becomes inconceivable. Thus my wish for freedom is not so much a wish to put all terrestrial things behind me & plunge forever into abysses beyond light, matter, & energy. That, indeed, would mean annihilation as a personality rather than liberation. My wish is perhaps best defined as a wish for infinite visioning & voyaging power, yet without loss of the familiar background which gives all things significance. I want to know what stretches Outside, & be able to visit all the gulfs & dimensions beyond Space & Time. I want, too, to juggle the calendar at will; bringing things from the immemorial past down into the present, & making long journeys into the forgotten years. But I want the familiar Old Providence of my childhood as a perpetual base for these necromancies & excursions—& in a good part of these necromancies & excursions I want certain transmuted features of Old Providence to form part of the alien voids I visit or conjure up. I am as geographic-minded as a cat—places are everything to me. Long observation has shewn me that no other objective experience can give me even a quarter of the kick I can extract from the sight of a fresh landscape or urban vista whose antiquity & historic linkages are such as to correspond with certain fixed childhood dream-patterns of mine. Of course my twilight cosmos of half-familiar, fleetingly remembered marvels is just as unattainable as your Ultimate Abysses—this being the real secret of its fascination. Nothing really known can continue to be acutely fascinating—the charm of many familiar things being mainly resident in their power to symbolise or suggest unknown extensions & overtones.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Clark Ashton Smith (7 November 1930), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 214
Non-Fiction, Letters

Secret, Dreams, Feeling, Cats

“Each state of the human mind has some parable in the physical creation by which it is shadowed forth; nor is it only artists and poets, but even the most abstract thinkers that have drawn from this source. Lively activity we name fire; time is a stream that rolls on, sweeping all before it; eternity is a circle; a mystery is hid in midnight gloom, and truth dwells in the sun. Nay, I begin to believe that even the future destiny of the human race is prefigured in the dark oracular utterances of bodily creation.”

Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright

Letter 4: Theosophy of Julius
The Philosophical Letters

Truth, Time, Sun, Future

“Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter, seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.”

W.B. Yeats book Michael Robartes and the Dancer

St. 3 Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), Easter, 1916 http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1477/

Winter, Heart, Summer

“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

“I have not permitted myself, gentlemen, to conclude that I am the best man in the country; but I am reminded, in this connection, of a story of an old Dutch farmer, who remarked to a companion once that it was not best to swap horses when crossing streams.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Reply to delegation from the National Union League approving and endorsing "the nominations made by the Union National Convention at Baltimore." New York Times, Herald, and Tribune (10 June 1864) Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume 7 http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=lincoln;rgn=div1;view=text;idno=lincoln7;node=lincoln7%3A852 To a delegation of the National Union League who congratulated him on his nomination as the Republican candidate for President, June 9, 1864. As given by J. F. Rhodes—Hist. of the U. S. from the Compromise of 1850, Volume IV, p. 370. Same in Nicolay and Hay Lincoln's Complete Works, Volume II, p. 532. Different version in Appleton's Cyclopedia. Raymond—Life and Public Services of Abraham Lincoln, Chapter XVIII, p. 500. (Ed. 1865) says Lincoln quotes an old Dutch farmer, "It was best not to swap horses when crossing a stream". Variant: I do not allow myself to suppose that either the convention or the League, have concluded to decide that I am either the greatest or the best man in America, but rather they have concluded it is not best to swap horses while crossing the river, and have further concluded that I am not so poor a horse that they might not make a botch of it in trying to swap. note Source: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=lincoln;rgn=div1;view=text;idno=lincoln7;node=lincoln7%3A852 Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume 7

Horse, Country

“Touch us gently, Time!
Let us glide adown thy stream
Gently,—as we sometimes glide
Through a quiet dream.”

Bryan Procter (1787–1874) English poet

Touch us gently, Time, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). Compare "Time has touched me gently in his race, And left no odious furrows in my face", George Crabbe, Tales of the Hall, Book xvii., The Widow.

Dreams, Time

“It is because the cosmos is meaningless that we must secure our individual illusions of values, direction, and interest by upholding the artificial streams which give us such worlds of salutary illusion. That is—since nothing means anything in itself, we must preserve the proximate and arbitrary background which makes things around us seem as if they did mean something. In other words, we are either Englishmen or nothing whatever.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to James F. Morton (6 November 1930), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 208
Non-Fiction, Letters, to James Ferdinand Morton, Jr.

World

“As a breeze or an echo rebounds from the smooth rocks and returns whence it came, so does the stream of beauty, passing through the eyes which are the windows of the soul, come back to the beautiful one.”

Plato book Phaedrus

255c
Phaedrus

Beauty, Soul

“Restraining the thought-streams natural to the mind, … the seer dwells in his own nature. Otherwise he is of the same form as the thought-streams.”

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

§ 1.2
Yoga Sutras of Patañjali

Nature

“Let's be simple and calm,
Like the trees and streams,
And God will love us, making us
Us, even as the trees are trees
And the streams are streams,
And will give us greenness in the spring, which is its season,
And a river to go to when we end…
And he'll give us nothing more, since to give us more would make us less us.”

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

Sejamos simples e calmos,
Como os regatos e as árvores,
E Deus amar-nos-á fazendo de nós
Belos como as árvores e os regatos,
E dar-nos-á verdor na sua primavera,
E um rio aonde ir ter quando acabemos...
E não nos dará mais nada, porque dar-nos mais seria tirar-nos mais.
Alberto Caeiro (heteronym), O Guardador de Rebanhos ("The Keeper of Sheep"), VI — in A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, trans. Richard Zenith (Penguin, 2006)

Love, God, Spring, Tree

“When swept out of its normal channel, life scatters into innumerable streams. It is difficult to foresee which it will take in its treacherous and winding course. Where to-day it flows in shallows, like a rivulet over sandbanks, so shallow that the shoals are visible, to-morrow it will flow richly and fully.”

Mikhail Sholokhov book And Quiet Flows the Don

And Quiet Flows the Don (1934)

Life

“The various philosophies of life presented themselves as a conquest of materialism, or in any case, they readily claimed it. That does not change anything: their valuations, revaluations, and explanations of disvalue have been emptied into the over-all secularization stream, where they have only hastened the tendency to unlearn, which is a neutralizing process, after all.”

Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) German jurist, political theorist and professor of law

"The Tyranny of Values" (1967)

Life, Change

“The Sovereignty of the Father is like a woman who is carrying a jar full of grain. While she was walking on a distant road, the handle of the jar broke, the grain streamed out behind her onto the road. She did not observe it, she had noticed no accident. When she arrived in her house, she set the jar down—she found it empty.”

Thomas the Apostle Apostle of Jesus Christ

97
Gospel of Thomas (c. 50? — c. 140?)

Distant, Housing

“The wave of terror radiated from the suffering city and spread throughout Germany. Appalling details of the great fire were recounted. The glow of the fires could be seen for one hundred twenty miles. A stream of haggard, terrified refugees flowed into the neighbouring provinces. In every large town people said, 'what happened in Hamburg yesterday can happen to us tomorrow.' Berlin was evacuated amid signs of panic. In spite of strict reticence in official communiques, the terror of Hamburg spread rapidly to the remotest villages of the Reich. After Hamburg in the wide circle of the political and the military command could be heard the words: "The war is lost".”

Adolf Galland (1912–1996) German World War II general and fighter pilot

Quoted in "The Devil's Disciples: Hitler's Inner Circle" - Page 807 - by Anthony Read - History - 2004.

War, People, Suffering

“There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells. God is within her, she will not fall; God will help her at break of day.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2011, Tucson Memorial Address (January 2011)

God, Help

“One day, as I was roaming the mountains, I sought shelter from an approaching storm. The sky became overhung with heavy clouds, but somehow the rain was delayed until, all of a sudden, there was a lightening flash and a few moments after, a deluge. This observation set me thinking. It was manifest that the two phenomena were closely related, as cause and effect, and a little reflection led me to the conclusion that the electrical energy involved in the precipitation of the water was inconsiderable, the function of the lightening being much like that of a sensitive trigger. Here was a stupendous possibility of achievement. If we could produce electric effects of the required quality, this whole planet and the conditions of existence on it could be transformed. The sun raises the water of the oceans and winds drive it to distant regions where it remains in a state of most delicate balance. If it were in our power to upset it when and wherever desired, this might life sustaining stream could be at will controlled. We could irrigate arid deserts, create lakes and rivers, and provide motive power in unlimited amounts. This would be the most efficient way of harnessing the sun to the uses of man. The consummation depended on our ability to develop electric forces of the order of those in nature.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

My Inventions (1919)

Life, Way, Mountain, Motivation

“As long as I breathe I hope. As long as I breathe I shall fight for the future, that radiant future, in which man, strong and beautiful, will become master of the drifting stream of his history and will direct it towards the boundless horizons of beauty, joy and happiness!”

Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) Marxist revolutionary from Russia

"On Optimism and Pessimism, on the Twentieth Century, and on Many Other Things" (1901), as quoted in The Prophet Armed : Trotsky, 1879-1921 (2003) by Isaac Deutscher , p. 45

Beauty, Hope, History, Strong

“The streaming plain, seamed and seared with long parallel canals and scooped into water-holes, is an immensity, and these castaways who strive to exhume themselves from it are legion. But the thirty million slaves, hurled upon one another in the mud of war by guilt and error, uplift their human faces and reveal at last a bourgeoning Will. The future is in the hands of these slaves, and it is clearly certain that the alliance to be cemented some day by those whose number and whose misery alike are infinite will transform the old world.”

Henri Barbusse book Under Fire

Under Fire (1916), Ch. 1 - The Vision

War, World, Error, Water

“Is it for the cultivated man, the man of broad and general views, to throw himself without reserve and with all his weight, into what, for aught he yet knows, may be only a cross-current and eddy, instead of the main stream of truth?”

William Greenough Thayer Shedd (1820–1894) American theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 349.

Truth

“I know that when the world
surrenders, pallid, to repose,
the murmur of a tranquil stream
through the deep silence flows.”

José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader

I (Yo soy un hombre sincero) as translated by Esther Allen in José Martí : Selected Writings (2002), p. 275
Simple Verses (1891)

World, Silence

“No anthropologist of standing insists on the uniformly advanced evolution of the Nordic as compared with that of other Caucasian and Mongolian races. As a matter of fact, it is freely conceded that the Mediterranean race turns out a higher percentage of the aesthetically sensitive and that the Semitic groups excel in sharp, precise intellectation. It may be, too, that the Mongolian excels in aesthetick capacity and normality of philosophical adjustment. What, then, is the secret of pro-Nordicism among those who hold these views? Simply this—that ours is a Nordic culture, and that the roots of that culture are so inextricably tangled in the national standards, perspectives, traditions, memories, instincts, peculiarities, and physical aspects of the Nordic stream that no other influences are fitted to mingle in our fabric. We don't despise the French in France or Quebec, but we don't want them grabbing our territory and creating foreign islands like Woonsocket and Fall River. The fact of this uniqueness of every separate culture-stream—this dependence of instinctive likes and dislikes, natural methods, unconscious appraisals, etc., etc., on the physical and historical attributes of a single race—is to obvious to be ignored except by empty theorists.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to James F. Morton (18 January 1931), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 587
Non-Fiction, Letters, to James Ferdinand Morton, Jr.

Secret, Nature, Memory, Dependency

“In the heart of Europe runs the purest stream of human love, of justice, of spirit of self-sacrifice for higher ideals. The Christian culture of centuries has sunk deep in her life's core. In Europe we have seen noble minds who have ever stood up for the rights of man irrespective of colour and creed.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

"Nationalism in the West", 1917. Reprinted in Rabindranath Tagore and Mohit K. Ray, Essays (2007, p. 475). Also cited in John Jesudason Cornelius, Rabindranath Tagore: India's Schoolmaster, (1928, p. 83).

Love, Life, Justice, Heart

“It always demands a far greater degree of courage for an individual to oppose an organized movement than to let himself be carried along with the stream — individual courage, that is, a variety of courage that is dying out in these times of progressive organization and mechanization. During the war practically the only courage I ran across was mass courage, the courage that comes of being one of a herd, and anyone who examines this phenomenon more closely will find it to be compounded of some very strange elements: a great deal of vanity, a great deal of fear — yes, fear of staying behind, fear of being sneered at fear of independent action, and fear, above all, of taking up a stand against the mass enthusiasm of one's fellows.”

Stefan Zweig book Beware of Pity

Beware of Pity (1939)

War, Fear, Courage, Time

“It is paradoxical that an administration that came to office rejecting the whole apparatus of Keynesian economics finds itself presiding over a stream of what threaten to be permanent deficits.”

Thomas J. Sargent (1943) American economist

Thomas J. Sargent "Back to Basics On Budgets", The New York Times (August 10, 1983).

“I am no longer misled, therefore, by the mechanism of revolutions: it is as necessary to our species, as the waves to the stream, that it becomes not a stagnant pool. The genius of humanity blooms in continually renovated youth.”

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic

Das Maschinenwerk der Revolutionen irret mich also nicht mehr: es ist unserm Geschlecht so nötig, wie dem Strom seine Wogen, damit er nicht ein stehender Sumpf werde. Immer verjüngt in neuen Gestalten, blüht der Genius der Humanität.
Vol. 1, p. 294; translation vol. 1, p. 416
Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784-91)

Youth

“Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

Long-Legged Fly http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1525/, refrain Last Poems (1936-1939)

Silence, Flying

“And all my days are trances,
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy grey eye glances,
And where thy footstep gleams —
In what ethereal dances,
By what eternal streams.”

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) American author, poet, editor and literary critic

"To One In Paradise", st. 4; variants of this verse read "where thy dark eye glances".

Dreams, Dance

“Here in the United States we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping-grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy forests, and exterminate fishes, birds, and mammals—not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisements. But at last it looks as if our people were awakening. Many leading men, Americans and Canadians, are doing all they can for the Conservation movement.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

"Our Vanishing Wildlife", in The Outlook (25 January 1913); republished in Literary Essays (vol. 12 of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, national ed., 1926), chapter 46, p. 420
1910s

Men, People, Bird, Fish

“A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1910s, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays http://archive.org/stream/mysticism00russuoft/mysticism00russuoft_djvu.txt (1918), Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic

World, Thinking, Time

“I am not superstitious, but the first time I saw this medal, bearing the venerated likeness of John Calvin, I kissed it, imagining that no one saw the action. I was very greatly surprised when I received this magnificent present, which shall be passed round for your inspection. On the one side is John Calvin with his visage worn by disease and deep thought, and on the other side is a verse fully applicable to him: ‘He endured, as seeing Him who is invisible.’
This sentence truly describes the character of that glorious man of God. Among all those who have been born of women, there has not risen a greater than John Calvin; no age, before him ever produced his equal, and no age afterwards has seen his rival. In theology, he stands alone, shining like a bright fixed star, while other leaders and teachers can only circle round him, at a great distance — as comets go streaming through space — with nothing like his glory or his permanence.”

Charles Spurgeon (1834–1892) British preacher, author, pastor and evangelist

The Autobiography of Charles H. Spurgeon, Compiled from His Diaries, Letters, and Records by His Wife and His Private Secretary, 1899, Fleming H. Revell, Vol. 2, (1854-1860), pp. 371-372. http://books.google.com/books?id=t3RAAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA371&dq=%22I+saw+this+medal,+bearing+the+venerated+likeness+of+John+Calvin,+I+kissed+it%22&hl=en&ei=JP4LTd-SMcX_lgf0--yzDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22I%20saw%20this%20medal%2C%20bearing%20the%20venerated%20likeness%20of%20John%20Calvin%2C%20I%20kissed%20it%22&f=false

Women, God, Age, Disease

“The intelligible forms of ancient poets,
The fair humanities of old religion,
The power, the beauty, and the majesty
That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain,
Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,
Or chasms and watery depths, — all these have vanished;
They live no longer in the faith of reason.”

Friedrich Schiller Wallenstein

Act II, sc. iv
Wallenstein (1798), Part I - Die Piccolomini (The Piccolomini)

Faith, Religion, Beauty, Mountain

“Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

The Wild Swans At Coole, st. 4
The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)

Lovers, Heart

“No one thinks or feels or appreciates or lives a mental-emotional-imaginative life at all, except in terms of the artificial reference-points supply'd him by the enveloping body of race-tradition and heritage into which he is born. We form an emotionally realisable picture of the external world, and an emotionally endurable set of illusions as to values and directions in existence, solely and exclusively through the arbitrary concepts and folkways bequeathed to us through our traditional culture-stream. Without this stream around us we are absolutely adrift in a meaningless and irrelevant chaos which has not the least capacity to give us any satisfaction apart from the trifling animal ones... Without our nationality—that is, our culture-grouping—we are merely wretched nuclei of agony and bewilderment in the midst of alien and directionless emptiness... We have an Aryan heritage, a Western-European heritage, a Teutonic-Celtic heritage, an Anglo-Saxon or English heritage, an Anglo-American heritage, and so on—but we can't detach one layer from another without serious loss—loss of a sense of significance and orientation in the world. America without England is absolutely meaningless to a civilised man of any generation yet grown to maturity. The breaking of the saving tie is leaving these colonies free to build up a repulsive new culture of money, speed, quantity, novelty, and industrial slavery, but that future culture is not ours, and has no meaning for us... Possibly the youngest generation already born and mentally active—boys of ten to fifteen—will tend to belong to it, as indeed a widespread shift in their tastes and instincts and loyalties would seem to indicate. But to say all this has anything to do with us is a joke! These boys are the Bedes and Almins of a new, encroaching, and apparently inferior culture. We are the Boëthii and Symmachi and Cassiodori of an older and perhaps dying culture. It is to our interest to keep our own culture alive as long as we can—and if possible to reserve and defend certain areas against the onslaughts of the enemy.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to James F. Morton (6 November 1930), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 207
Non-Fiction, Letters, to James Ferdinand Morton, Jr.

Life, Money, World, Feeling

“Upon the brink of the wild stream
He stood, and dreamt a mighty dream.”

Aleksandr Pushkin The Bronze Horseman

Original: (ru) ‎На берегу пустынных волн Стоял он, дум великих полн.
Source: The Bronze Horseman (1833) trans. Charles Johnston.

Dreams

“Then in a tone of silver it addressed me: "It is the end. They have come down through the gloaming from the stars. Now all is over, and beyond the Arinurian streams we shall dwell blissfully in Teloe."”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Fiction, The Crawling Chaos (1921)
Context: There now ensued a series of incidents which transported me to the opposite extremes of ecstasy and horror; incidents which I tremble to recall and dare not seek to interpret. No sooner had I crawled beneath the overhanging foliage of the palm, than there dropped from its branches a young child of such beauty as I never beheld before. Though ragged and dusty, this being bore the features of a faun or demigod, and seemed almost to diffuse a radiance in the dense shadow of the tree. It smiled and extended its hand, but before I could arise and speak I heard in the upper air the exquisite melody of singing; notes high and low blent with a sublime and ethereal harmoniousness. The sun had by this time sunk below the horizon, and in the twilight I saw an aureole of lambent light encircled the child's head. Then in a tone of silver it addressed me: "It is the end. They have come down through the gloaming from the stars. Now all is over, and beyond the Arinurian streams we shall dwell blissfully in Teloe." As the child spoke, I beheld a soft radiance through the leaves of the palm tree, and rising, greeted a pair whom I knew to be the chief singers among those I had heard. A god and goddess they must have been, for such beauty is not mortal; and they took my hands, saying, "Come, child, you have heard the voices, and all is well...."

Star

“Time, space, and natural law hold for me suggestions of intolerable bondage, and I can form no picture of emotional satisfaction which does not involve their defeat—especially the defeat of time, so that one may merge oneself with the whole historic stream and be wholly emancipated from the transient and the ephemeral.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to August Derleth (21 November 1930), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 220
Non-Fiction, Letters, to August Derleth
Context: Time, space, and natural law hold for me suggestions of intolerable bondage, and I can form no picture of emotional satisfaction which does not involve their defeat—especially the defeat of time, so that one may merge oneself with the whole historic stream and be wholly emancipated from the transient and the ephemeral. Yet I can assure you that this point of view is joined to one of the plainest, naivest, and most unobtrusively old-fashioned of personalities—a retiring old hermit and ascetic who does not even know what your contemporary round of activities and "parties" is like, and who during the coming winter will probably not address two consecutive sentences to any living person—tradesmen apart—save a pair of elderly aunts! Some people—a very few, perhaps—are naturally cosmic in outlook, just as others are naturally 'of and for the earth'. I am myself less exclusively cosmic than Klarkash-Ton and Wandrei... I begin with the individual and the soil and think outward—appreciating the sensation of spatial and temporal liberation only when I can scale it against the known terrestrial scene. They, on the other hand, are able to think of wholly non-human abysses of ultimate space—without reference-points—as realities neither irrelevant nor less significant than immediate human life. With me, the very quality of being cosmically sensitive breeds an exaggerated attachment to the familiar and the immediate—Old Providence, the woods and hills, the ancient ways and thoughts of New England—whilst with them it seems to have the opposite effect of alienating them from immediate anchorages. They despise the immediate as trivial; I know that it is trivial, but cherish rather than despise it—because everything, including infinity itself, is trivial. In reality I am the profoundest cynic of them all, for I recognize no absolute values whatever.

Law, Nature, Time

“With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

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

1960s, Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam (1967)
Context: I have not lost faith. I'm not in despair, because I know that there is a moral order. I haven't lost faith, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. I can still sing "We Shall Overcome" because Carlyle was right: "No lie can live forever." We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant was right: "Truth pressed to earth will rise again." We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell was right: "Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne." Yet, that scaffold sways the future. We shall overcome because the bible is right: "You shall reap what you sow." With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when the lion and the lamb will lie down together, and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid because the words of the Lord have spoken it. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when all over the world we will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we're free at last!" With this faith, we'll sing it as we're getting ready to sing it now. Men will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. And nations will not rise up against nations, neither shall they study war anymore. And I don't know about you, I ain't gonna study war no more.

World, Faith, Justice, Beauty

“Let my delight be the country, and the running streams amid the dells—may I love the waters and the woods, though I be unknown to fame.”
Rura mihi et rigui placeant in vallibus amnes, Flumina amem sylvasque inglorius.

Virgil Georgics

Book II, lines 485–486 (tr. Fairclough)
Georgics (29 BC)

Love, Water, Country

“Envious of none, I am determined to be pleased with all; and this my dear friend, being the order for my march, I will move gently down the stream of life, until I sleep with my Fathers.”

George Washington (1732–1799) first President of the United States

Letter http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=296 to Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette (1 February 1784) 1780s Context: I am become a private citizen on the banks of the Potomac, and under the shadow of my own Vine and my own Fig-tree, free from the bustle of a camp and the busy scenes of public life, I am solacing myself with those tranquil enjoyments, of which the Soldier who is ever in pursuit of fame, the Statesman whose watchful days and sleepless nights are spent in devising schemes to promote the welfare of his own, perhaps the ruin of other countries, as if this globe was insufficient for us all, and the Courtier who is always watching the countenance of his Prince, in hopes of catching a gracious smile, can have very little conception. I am not only retired from all public employments, but I am retiring within myself; and shall be able to view the solitary walk, and tread the paths of private life with heartfelt satisfaction. Envious of none, I am determined to be pleased with all; and this my dear friend, being the order for my march, I will move gently down the stream of life, until I sleep with my Fathers.

Life, Sleep

“These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice, as inaudible as the streams of sound conveyed by electric waves beyond the range of our hearing; and just as the touch of button on our stereo will fill the room with music, so by opening one of these volumes, one can call into range a voice far distant in time and space, and hear it speaking, mind to mind, heart to heart.”

Gilbert Highet (1906–1978) British academic

The Immortal Profession: The Joys of Teaching and Learning (1976)

Time, Heart, Music, Distant

“For we have in Latin only a few small streams and muddy puddles, while they have pure springs and rivers flowing in gold. I see that it is utter madness even to touch with the little finger that branch of theology that deals chiefly with the divine mysteries, unless one is also provided with the equipment of Greek.”

Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, and theologian

As quoted in Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World (2017) by By Eric Metaxas, p. 85

Madness, Spring

“By the time it came to the edge of the Forest the stream had grown up, so that it was almost a river, and, being grown-up, it did not run and jump and sparkle along as it used to do when it was younger, but moved more slowly. For it knew now where it was going, and it said to itself, "There is no hurry. We shall get there some day."”

A.A. Milne book The House at Pooh Corner

Source: The House at Pooh Corner (1928), Chapter Six.

Time

“I have an expectation that there’ll be a cooling in the existing market. But as I say, our view that we absolutely maintain is that we’re bringing on-stream a section of the housing market that is undersupplied and that we don’t expect to see a dramatic drop in people’s housing values. [...] At the moment it’s cooling because we’re seeing potentially that easing off by meeting the fact that we’re easing off a bit of demand. It’s not clear whether or not that will be sustained. We believe that if we want to make sure we’re addressing the issues we have, it is about addressing supply as well.”

Jacinda Ardern (1980) Prime Minister of New Zealand

Interview with Lisa Owen at Newshub Nation, 21 October 2017

Making love, Housing, People

“Do not discount my tears; eternal wisdom has decreed
That in this flowing stream the seven millstones all revolve.”

Ghalib (1797–1869) Urdu-Persian poet

Selections from the Persian Ghazals of Ghalib, p. 10
Poetry, Persian Couplets

Wisdom, Tear

“Instead of "watching the thinker," you can also create a gap in the mind stream simply by directing the focus of your attention into the Now. Just become intensely conscious of the present moment. This is a deeply satisfying thing to do. In this way, you draw consciousness away from mind activity and create a gap of no-mind in which you are highly alert and aware but not thinking. This is the essence of meditation. In your everyday life, you can practice this by taking any routine activity that normally is only a means to an end and giving it your fullest attention, so that it becomes an end in itself.”

Eckhart Tolle book The Power of Now

The Power of Now (1997)

Way, Life, Drawing, Thinking

“As you listen to the thought, you feel a conscious presence - your deeper self - behind or underneath the thought, as it were. The thought then loses its power over you and quickly subsides, because you are no longer energizing the mind through identification with it. This is the beginning of the end of involuntary and compulsive thinking. When a thought subsides, you experience a discontinuity in the mental stream - a gap of "no-mind." At first, the gaps will be short, a few seconds perhaps, but gradually they will become longer. When these gaps occur, you feel a certain stillness and peace inside you.”

Eckhart Tolle book The Power of Now

Source: The Power of Now (1997)

Self-confidence, Thinking, Feeling

“No one goes to the stream early morning and comes back with dirty water.”

Dr. Manuel

Water

“A leaf carried away with the stream of water, it can crash along the way, or go on to the darkest parts of the unknown ocean.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Water, Way, Parting

“A moment of danger can bring about a temporary cessation of the stream of thinking and thus give you a taste of what it means to be present, alert, aware.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Source: Stillness Speaks (2003), Ch 2

Thinking

“Ultimately, both self and belief drift away, like autumn leaves in a stream.”

Ladybelle Fiske (nickname)

Autumn

“Had records so stellar, they had to lock their resumes in a drawer at night, so the golden light streaming from the pages wouldn't keep them awake.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Slays

Light, Night

“It may be that when we no longer know which way to go that we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Way, Singing

“All things of the body stream away like a river, all things of the mind are dreams and delusion; life is warfare, and a visit to a strange land; the only lasting fame is oblivion.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Source: Meditations

Life, Dreams

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Standing by Words: Essays (2011), Poetry and Marriage: The Use of Old Forms (1982)
Context: It may be, then, that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Way, Singing

“When a man must be afraid to drink freely from his country's river and streams that country is no longer fit to live in.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

Drink, Country