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Rivers hold a special place in our heart and in our history

• Rivers are inherently interesting. They mold landscapes, create fertile deltas, provide trade routes, a source for food and water; a place to wash and play; civilizations emerged next to rivers in China, India, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. They sustain life and bring death and destruction. They are ferocious at times; gentle at times. They are placid and mean. They trigger conflict and delineate boundaries. Rivers are the stuff of metaphor and fable, painting and poetry. Rivers unite and divide—a thread that runs from source to exhausted release. Edward Gargan
• I have never seen a river that I could not love. Moving water . . . has a fascinating vitality. It has power and grace and associations. It has a thousand colors and a thousand shapes, yet it follows laws so definite that the tiniest streamlet is an exact replica of a great river. Roderick Haig-Brown
• The river is the center of the land, the place where the waters, and much more, come together. Here is the home of wildlife, the route of explorers, and recreation paradise. . . . Only fragments of our inheritance remain unexploited, but these streams are more valuable than ever. Tim Palmer
• May the countryside and the gliding valley streams content me. Lost to fame, let me love river and woodland. Virgil
• Nature,  The ocean,  Lakes,  Waterfalls,  Care for the environment

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Rivers are the sacred life blood of nature

• The land is sacred. These words are at the core of your being. The land is our mother, the rivers our blood. Take our land away and we die. That is, the Indian in us dies. Brave Bird, Mary
• I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. Langston Hughes
• A good river is nature’s life work in song. Mark Helprin
• A river does not just happen; it has a beginning and an end. Its story is written in rich earth, in ice, and in water-carved stone, and its story as the lifeblood of the land is filled with colour, music and thunder. Andy Russell
• Mother Nature is our wild world. A wild, winding river is her autograph. Duane Short
• I was born upon thy bank, river, by blood flows in thy stream, and thou meanderest forever, at the bottom of my dream. Henry David Thoreau

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Rivers are nature’s renegades

• Wild rivers are earth’s renegades, defying gravity, dancing to their own tunes, resisting the authority of humans, always chipping away, and eventually always winning. Richard Bangs & Christian Kallen
• It is with rivers as it is with people: The greatest are not always the most agreeable nor the best to live with. Henry van Dyke

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Rivers are full of wonder and beauty

• People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains, at the huge waves of the seas, at the long course of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars, and yet they pass by themselves without wondering. Augustine
• Everything is extraordinarily clear. I see the whole landscape before me, I see my hands, my feet, my toes, and I smell the rich river mud.  I feel a sense of tremendous strangeness and wonder at being alive.  Wonder of wonders.  Gautama Buddha
• A river seems a magic thing. A magic, moving, living part of the very earth itself. Laura Gilpin
• I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable. S. Eliot
• I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again. I was fascinated by how it sped by and yet was always there; its roar shook both the earth and me. Wallace Stegner
• It’s simple things, like a glowing sunset, the sound of a running stream or the fresh smell in a meadow that cause us to pause and marvel at the wonder of life, to contemplate its meaning and significance. Who can hold an autumn leaf in their hand, or sift the warm white sand on the beach, and not wonder at the Creator of it all? Wendy Moore
• Wonder,  Beauty

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Rivers leave their mark on the soul

• Forests, lakes, and rivers, clouds and winds, stars and flowers, stupendous glaciers and crystal snowflakes – every form of animate or inanimate existence, leaves its impress upon the soul of man. Orison Swett Marden
• Fish come and go, but it is the memory of afternoons on the stream that endure. Donnall Thomas
• The soul

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Rivers are the closest of friends

• A brook can be a friend in a special way. It talks to you with splashy gurgles. It cools your toes and lets you sit quietly beside it when you don’t feel like speaking. Joan Walsh Anglund
• A river is the cosiest of friends. You must love it and live with it before you can know it. W. Curtis
• The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. The rivers carry our canoes, and feed our children. If we sell you our land, you must remember, 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. Suquamish Chief Sealth, 1854
• A river is the most human and companionable of all inanimate things. It has a life, a character, a voice of its own, and is as full of good fellowship as a sugar-maple is of sap. It can talk in various tones, loud or low, and of many subjects grave and gay . . . For real company and friendship, there is nothing outside of the animal kingdom that is comparable to a river. Henry van Dyke, Little Rivers
• Friendship

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Rivers are a mystery

• We don’t tend to ask where a lake comes from. It lies before us, contained and complete, tantalizing in its depth but not its origin. A river is a different kind of mystery, a mystery of distance and becoming, a mystery of source. Touch its fluent body and you touch far places. You touch a story that must end somewhere but cannot stop telling itself, a story that is always just beginning. John Daniel
• Mystery

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Rivers are a treasure

• A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure. Oliver Wendell Holmes

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Rivers draw us to them

• We are never far from the lilt and swirl of living water. Whether to fish or swim or paddle, of only to stand and gaze, to glance as we cross a bridge, all of us are drawn to rivers, all of us happily submit to their spell. We need their familiar mystery. We need their fluent lives interflowing with our own. John Daniel
• f you grew up in the country, chances are you have fond memories of lazy days down by a river, creek or pond. Darlene Donaldson
• Rivers are magnets for the imagination, for conscious pondering and subconscious dreams, thrills, fears. People stare into the moving water, captivated, as they are when gazing into a fire. What is it that draws and holds us? The rivers’ reflections of our lives and experiences are endless. Tim Palmer

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Rivers connect us to everything

• I stand by the river and I know that it has been here yesterday and will be here tomorrow and that therefore, since I am part of its pattern today, I also belong to all its yesterdays and will be a part of all its tomorrows. This is a kind of earthly immortality, a kinship with rivers and hills and rocks, with all things and all creatures that have ever lived or ever will live or have their being on the earth. It is my assurance of an orderly continuity in the great design of the universe. Virginia Eifert
• To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together. Barry Lopez
• Wonderful how completely everything in wild nature fits into us, as if truly part and parent of us. The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fibre and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls, and every bird song, wind song, and; tremendous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love. John Muir
• The river moves from land to water to land, in and out of organisms, reminding us what native peoples have never forgotten: that you cannot separate the land from the water, or the people from the land. Lynn Noel
• Rivers are places that renew our spirit, connect us with our past, and link us directly with the flow and rhythm of the natural world. Ted Turner
• As you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens. Stephen Graham
• Each stone, each bend cries welcome to him. He identifies with the mountains and the streams, he sees something of his own soul in the plants and the animals and the birds of the field. Paulo Coelho
• Connectedness

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Rivers nurture life

• Rivers run through our history and folklore, and link us as a people. They nourish and refresh us and provide a home for dazzling varieties of fish and wildlife and trees and plants of every sort. We are a nation rich in rivers. Charles Kuralt
• Rivers are exquisite in their abilities to nurture life, sublime in functioning detail, impressive in contributions of global significance. Tim Palmer

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Rivers are the highways of the wilderness

• Rivers are highways that move on and bear us whither we wish to go. Blaise Pascal
• Rivers are the primal highways of life. From the crack of time, they had borne men’s dreams, and in their lovely rush to elsewhere, fed our wanderlust, mimicked our arteries, and charmed our imaginations in a way the static pond or vast and savage ocean never could. Tom Robbins
• To the lost man, to the pioneer penetrating a new country, to the naturalist who wishes to see the wild land at its wildest, the advice is always the same—follow a river. The river is the original forest highway. It is nature’s own Wilderness Road. Edwin Way Teale

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Rivers calm and soothe us

• Many a time have I merely closed my eyes at the end of yet another troublesome day and soaked my bruised psyche in wild water, rivers remembered and rivers imagined. Rivers course through my dreams, rivers cold and fast, rivers well- known and rivers nameless, rivers that seem like ribbons of blue water twisting through wide valleys, narrow rivers folded in layers of darkening shadows, rivers that have eroded down deep into a mountain’s belly, sculpted the land. Peeled back the planet’s history exposing the texture of time itself. Harry Middleton

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Sit by the river …

• The mark of a successful man is one that has spent an entire day on the bank of a river without feeling guilty about it. Chinese Philosopher
• Sit by a river. Find peace and meaning in the rhythm of the lifeblood of the Earth.
• Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees. Thomas Stonewall Jackson

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… or imagine you are

• If you’ re not beside a real river, close your eyes, and sit down beside an imaginary one, a river where you feel comfortable and safe. Know that the water has wisdom, in its motion through the world, as much wisdom as any of us have. Picture yourself as the water. We are liquid; we innately share water’s wisdom. Eric Alan

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Better still, live by a river

• One takes what the river offers, both good and bad. The joy of living by running water far outweighs the sorrow. Matthew Goldman
• To live by a large river is to be kept in the heart of things. John Haines
• In this sometimes turbulent world, the river is a cosmic symbol of durability and destiny; awesome, but steadfast. In this period of deep national concern, I wish everyone could live for a while beside a great river. Helen Hayes

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Meditate by the river and become one with it

• I sat there and forgot and forgot, until what remained was the river that went by and I who watched. On the river the heat mirages danced with each other and then they danced through each other and then they joined hands and danced around each other. Eventually the water joined the river, and there was only one of us. I believe it was the river. Norman Maclean
• Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things? Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Meditation

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Let the river inspire you

• What are the best times to reflect on the course of your life? Whenever you are near water, such as the ocean, a quiet pond, or a small stream. Bodies of water, particularly if they are moving, help to stimulate your creative thought process. Jeff Davidson
• Inspiration

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Listen to the song of the river

• When was the last time you stopped to listen to the wind blow through the trees? Or stopped to listen to a river as it flowed past you, or the crickets and frogs and other living things as they make their music? When was the last time you listened– truly listened– to a favorite song, paying attention to the lyrics, the drums, the rhythm, the guitars or strings?  Tom Walsh
• The mountains, rivers, earth, grasses, trees and forests are always emanating a subtle, precious light, day and night, always emanating a subtle precious sound, demonstrating and expounding to all people the unsurpassed ultimate truth. Yuan-Sou
• I choose to listen to the river for a while, thinking river thoughts, before joining the night and the stars. Edward Abbey
• The song of the river ends not at her banks but in the hearts of those who have loved her. Buffalo Joe
• The river called. The call is the thundering rumble of distant rapids, the intimate roar of white water . . . a primeval summons to primordial values. John Craighead
• The stream sings a subdued music, a scarcely audible lilt, faint and fluid syllables not quite said. It slips away into its future, where it already is, and flows steadily forth from up the canyon, a fountain of rumors from regions known to it and not to me. John Daniel
• A river, though, has so many things to say that it is hard to know what it says to each of us. Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It
• We sat on the bank and the river went by. As always, it was making sounds to itself, and now it made sounds to us. It would be hard to find three men sitting side by side who knew better what a river was saying. Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It
• A river sings a holy song conveying the mysterious truth that we are a river, and if we are ignorant of this natural law, we are lost. Thomas Moore
• There is no music like a little river’s . . . It takes the mind out-of-doors . . . and . . . it quiets a man down like saying his prayers. Robert Louis Stevenson
• Who hears the rippling of rivers will not utterly despair of anything. Henry David Thoreau
• I will take time each day to commune with nature and to silently witness the intelligence within every living thing. I will sit silently and watch a sunset, or listen to the sound of the ocean or a stream, or simply smell the scent of a flower. Deepak Chopra

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Watch the river flowing by

• Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known. A. Milne
• Every now and again take a good look at something not made with hands – a mountain, a star, the turn of a stream. There will come to you wisdom and patience and solace and, above all, the assurance that you are not alone in the world. Sidney Lovett
• In the same way that you can sit by a stream and watch leaves float by or look up at the sky watching the clouds come and go, while practicing mindfulness you’ll learn to become more aware of all the stuff that’s in your mind without attaching to it—just being aware of it as it comes and goes. Bob Stahl
• Go with the flow

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Put your hands in the water

• To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together. Barry Lopez

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Follow the river as it goes

• There are many ways to salvation, and one of them is to follow a river. David Brower
• It is pleasant to have been to a place the way a river went. Henry David Thoreau
• I know the joy of fishes in the river through my own joy, as I go walking along the same river. Zhuangzi

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Ride the river

• It is difficult to find in life any event which so effectually condenses intense nervous sensation into the shortest possible space of time as does the work of shooting, or running an immense rapid. There is no toil, no heart breaking labour about it, but as much coolness, dexterity, and skill as man can throw into the work of hand, eye, and head; knowledge of when to strike and how to do it; knowledge of water and rock, and of the one hundred combinations which rock and water can assume—for these two things, rock and water, taken in the abstract, fail as completely to convey any idea of their fierce embracings in the throes of a rapid as the fire burning quietly in a drawing-room fireplace fails to convey the idea of a house wrapped and sheeted in flames. Sir William Francis Butler
• As long as there are young men with the light of adventure in their eyes or a touch of wilderness in their souls, rapids will be run. Sigurd Olson
• The first river you paddle runs through the rest of your life. It bubbles up in pools and eddies to remind you who you are. Lynn Noel

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Let rivers be your teacher …

• Contemplate the workings of this world. Study how water flows in a valley stream, smoothly and freely between the rocks. Everything–even mountains, rivers, plants and trees–should be your teacher.  Morihei Ueshiba
• Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books. John Lubbock
• The Universe is one great kindergarten for man. Everything that exists has brought with it its own peculiar lesson. The mountain teaches stability and grandeur; the ocean immensity and change. Forests, lakes, and rivers, clouds and winds, stars and flowers, stupendous glaciers and crystal snowflakes, – every form of animate or inanimate existence, leaves its impress upon the soul of man. Even the bee and ant have brought their little lessons of industry and economy. Orison Swett Marden
• We call upon the waters that rim the earth, horizon to horizon, that flow in our rivers and streams, that fall upon our gardens and fields, and we ask that they teach us and show us the way. Chinook Blessing Litany
• The river has taught me to listen; you will learn from it, too. The river knows everything; one can learn everything from it. Herman Hesse
• But I also know that in places, the river still runs deep, and though I’ve floated it in these places, it hasn’t revealed itself in such obvious ways. I know that it might be months—years, even—before I understand what it has to teach me. I still need to give myself over to the flow and pattern and rhythm of it to learn its lessons and hear its messages. The river is inside me now, I know, and I need only wait and see where the current takes me, and what lies beneath it. Jeff Wallach
• Study how water flows in a valley stream, smoothly and freely between the rocks. Also learn from holy books and wise people. Everything – even mountains, rivers, plants and trees – should be your teacher. Morihei Ueshiba

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Let the river teach you patience

• Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there someday. A.A. Milne
• Rivers hardly ever are in a hurry yet is there anything more likely to reach the point it sets out for than a river? James Dillet Freeman
• There is no rushing a river. When you go there, you go at the pace of the water and that pace ties you into a flow that is older than life on this planet. Acceptance of that pace, even for a day, changes us, reminds us of other rhythms beyond the sound of our own heartbeats. Jeff Rennicke
• Ah . . . timelessness, a river’s secret weapon. Duane Short
• Patience

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Let the river teach you to let go

• The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare to let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure. Richard Bach

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Let river teach you to give

• No man is so poor as to have nothing worth giving: as well might the mountain streamlets say they have nothing to give the sea because they are not rivers. Give what you have. To someone it may be better than you dare to think. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• Giving

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Let the river teach you about purpose

• What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn’t have any doubt—it is sure to get where it is going, and it doesn’t want to go anywhere else. Hal Boyle
• Purpose

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Let the river teach you about freedom

• Keep your rivers flowing as they will, and you will continue to know the most important of all freedoms—the boundless scope of the human mind to contemplate wonders, and to begin to understand their meaning. David Brower
• Freedom

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Let the river teach you about life and death and rebirth

• I am beginning to understand that the stream the scientists are studying is not just a little creek. It’s a river of energy that moves across regions in great geographic cycles. Here, life and death are only different points on a continuum. The stream flows in a circle through time and space, turning death into life across coastal ecosystems, as it has for more than a million years. But such streams no longer flow in the places where most of us live. Kathleen Dean Moore and Jonathan W. Moore
• For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one. Khalil Gibran
• Streams represent constant rebirth. The water flows in, forever new, yet forever the same; they complete a journey from beginning to end, and then they embark on the journey again. Tim Palmer
• Death

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Let the river teach you about flux and change

• Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things? Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Change

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Let the river teach you how to be efficient in getting where you need to go

• We grow up hearing so often that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points that we end up thinking it is also the best way to get there. A river knows better—:it has to do with how it dissipates the energy of its flow most efficiently; and how, in its bends, the sediment deposited soon turns into marshes and swampy islands, harboring all manner of interesting life, imparting charm and character to the whole waterway. I would defy you to find a river on this planet that prefers to run straight, unless it has been taught so by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Tom Horton
• Efficiency

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Let the river teach you about going around obstacles

• Rivers hardly ever run in a straight line. Rivers are willing to take ten thousand meanders and enjoy every one and grow from everyone. When they leave a meander, they are always more than when they entered it. When rivers meet an obstacle, they do not try to run over it. They merely go around but they always get to the other side. Rivers accept things as they are, conform to the shape they find the world in, yet nothing changes things more than rivers. Rivers move even mountains into the sea. Rivers hardly ever are in a hurry yet is there anything more likely to reach the point it sets out for than a river?  James Dillet Freeman
• Look at the stream, there are rocks in its way. Does it slam into them out of frustration? It simply flows over and around them and moves on! Be like the water and you will know what harmony is. Zen Story
• Obstacles

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Let the river teach you about renewal and replenishment

• Rivers have what man most respects and longs for in his own life—a capacity for renewal and replenishment, continual energy, creativity, cleansing. John Kauffman
• Rest and renewal

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Let the river teach you about perseverance

• In the confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins–not through strength but by perseverance. Jackson Brown, Jr.
• Perseverance

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More life lessons we can learn from rivers

• Don’t burn bridges. You’ll be surprised how many times you have to cross the same river. Jackson Brown Jr.
• You drown not by falling into a river, but by staying submerged in it. Paulo Coelho
• If one wants to get a boat ride, one must be near the river. Anchee Min
• It is not best to swap horses while crossing the river. Abraham Lincoln
• You must have crossed the river before you tell the crocodile he has bad breath.
• Never insult an alligator until after you have crossed the river. Cordell Hull
• Always drink upstream from the herd. Will Rogers
• Luck affects everything; let your hook always be cast; in the stream where you least expect it, there will be a fish. Ovid

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Living in cities, we’ve lost connection with the river

• For many of us, water simply flows from a faucet, and we think little about it beyond this point of contact. We have lost a sense of respect for the wild river, for the complex workings of a wetland, for the intricate web of life that water supports. Sandra Postel
• For many of us, water simply flows from a faucet, and we think little about it beyond this point of contact. We have lost a sense of respect for the wild river, for the complex workings of a wetland, for the intricate web of life that water supports. Sandra Postel

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We’re destroying and poisoning the rivers

• Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money. Cree Indian Proverb
• Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he’s been given. But up to now he hasn’t been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life’s become extinct, the climate’s ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day. Anton Chekhov
• An unspoiled river is a very rare thing in this Nation today. Their flow and vitality have been harnessed by dams and too often they have been turned into open sewers by communities and by industries. It makes us all very fearful that all rivers will go this way unless somebody acts now to try to balance our river development. President Lyndon Johnson
• When you defile the pleasant streams, and the wild bird’s abiding place, you massacre a million dreams, and cast your spittle in God’s face. John Drinkwater

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We need to protect the rivers

• The forests are dying, the rivers are dying, and we are called to act. To return Earth to harmony is to restore the harmonious principles within ourselves and to act as responsible caretakers – to save the forests and the waters for future generations.   Dhyani Ywahoo
• The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up the river. Ross Perot
• Choosing to save a river is more often an act of passion than of careful calculation. You make the choice because the river has touched your life in an intimate and irreversible way, because you are unwilling to accept its loss. David Bolling
• In a country where nature has been so lavish and where we have been so spendthrift of indigenous beauty, to set aside a few rivers in their natural state should be considered an obligation. Frank Church
• In spite of the durability of rock-walled canyons and the surging power of cataracting water, the wild river is a fragile thing—the most fragile portion of the wilderness country. John Craighead
• When protected, rivers serve as visible symbols of the care we take as temporary inhabitants and full-time stewards of a living, profoundly beautiful heritage of nature. John Echeverria
• If a man fails to honor the rivers, he shall not gain the life from them. The Code of Hammurabi
• A river is more than an amenity—it is a treasure that offers a necessity of life that must be rationed among those who have the power over it. Oliver Wendell Holmes
• What would the world be, once bereft of wet and wilderness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wilderness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. Gerard Manley Hopkins
• Wetlands have a poor public image. . . . Yet they are among the earth’s greatest natural assets . . . mankind’s waterlogged wealth. Edward Maltby
• We let a river shower its banks with a spirit that invades the people living there, and we protect that river, knowing that without its blessings the people have no source of soul. Thomas Moore
• When we save a river, we save a major part of an ecosystem, and we save ourselves as well because of our dependence—physical, economic, spiritual—on the water and its community of life. Tim Palmer
• We must begin thinking like a river if we are to leave a legacy of beauty and life for future generations. David Brower
• We all live downstream. David Suzuki

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Let the rivers flow free

• If you dam a river it stagnates. Running water is beautiful water. So be a channel. English Proverb
• Men may dam it and say that they have made a lake, but it will still be a river. It will keep its nature and bide its time, like a caged animal alert for the slightest opening. In time, it will have its way; the dam, like the ancient cliffs, will be carried away piecemeal in the currents. Wendell Berry
• Let the mountains talk, let the river run. Once more, and forever. David Brower
• Change not the river, for rocks in the river are good and are like our problems—without them we would not know if there was any current. Dennis Mapes
• To drown a river beneath its own impounded water, by damming, is to kill what it was and to settle for something else. When the damming happens without good reason . . . then it’s a tragedy of diminishment for the whole planet, a loss of one more wild thing, leaving Earth just a little flatter and tamer and simpler and uglier than before. David Quammen

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Rivers make a good metaphor for many things …

• True merit, like a river, the deeper it is, the less noise it makes. Edward Frederick Halifax
• To take wine into our mouths is to savor a droplet of the river of human history. Clifton Paul Fadiman
• The virtues are lost in self-interest as rivers are in the sea. La Rochefoucauld
• The path of least resistance makes all rivers, and some men, crooked. Napoleon Hill
• Tears are a river that takes you somewhere. Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace better. Clarissa Pinkola Estes
• Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river. Lisa See
• Only the man who crosses the river at night knows the value of the light of day. Chinese Proverbs
• Dive again and again into the river of uncertainty. Create in the dark, only then can you recognize the light. Jyrki Vainonen
• The more you know yourself, the more clarity there is. Self-knowledge has no end – you don’t come to an achievement, you don’t come to a conclusion. It is an endless river. Jiddu Krishnamurti
• Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid. Francis Bacon
• Whatever be the qualities of the man with whom a woman is united according to the law, such qualities even she assumes, like a river, united with the ocean. Guru Nanak
• “If we study the lives of great men and women carefully and unemotionally we find that, invariably, greatness was developed, tested and revealed through the darker periods of their lives. One of the largest tributaries of the river of greatness is always the stream of adversity. Cavett Robert
• Fame, like the river, is narrowest where it is bred, and broadest afar off. William Davenant
• Metaphors to live by

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… especially spiritual matters

• To stay present in everyday life, it helps to be deeply rooted within yourself; otherwise, the mind, which has incredible momentum, will drag you along like a wild river. Eckhart Tolle
• To insist on a spiritual practice that served you in the past is to carry the raft on your back after you have crossed the river.
• The nature of light is to shine. The way of the river is to return home to its sea. The essence of human is being. Chad Christopher Cobb
• Talking about Zen all the time is like looking for fish tracks in a dry riverbed. Wu-Tzu
• At this moment, you are seamlessly flowing with the cosmos. There is no difference between your breathing and the breathing of the rain forest, between your bloodstream and the world’s rivers, between your bones and the chalk cliffs of Dover. Deepak Chopra
• For the sake of it, you journey to sacred shrines and holy rivers; but this priceless jewel is within your own heart. Sri Guru Granth
• Forget all you know or think you know; abandon power and enforced decree. Inward, where the deepest rivers flow, find the currents of eternity. Wayland Drew
• How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.  Antoine de Saint- Exupery
• No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man. Heraclitus
• You cannot step into the same river twice. Heraclitus
• Where the stream runneth smoothest, the water is deepest. John Lyly
• The stream is always purer at its source. Blaise Pascal
• The small force that it takes to launch a boat into the stream should not be confused with the force of the stream that carries it along: but this confusion appears in nearly all biographies. Friedrich Nietzsche
• Spirituality

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Life is like a river

• Life is like the river, sometimes it sweeps you gently along and sometimes the rapids come out of nowhere. Emma Smith
• Life is always flowing on like a river, sometimes with murmurs, sometimes without bending this way or that, we do not exactly see why; now in beautiful picturesque places, now through barren and uninteresting scenes, but always flowing with a look of treachery about it; it is so swift, so voiceless, yet so continuous. Faber
• There is a saying that life is a river and it will take you to where ever you want to go. But reality, if you fell into a river, would you think that? No. You would try to swim to shore. Alicia Figgs
• People who have lost relationships often wonder why they can’t just let it be “water under the bridge.” It is water under the bridge – the trouble is we do not live on the bridge but in the river of life with its many twists and turns. Grant Fairley
• Character develops itself in the stream of life. Johann Wolfgang von Goeth
• I want my life to be a mountain stream that rushes down wild flowered slopes through pine glades into green valleys, I do not want culverts to contain my force or cement to channel my flow, nothing to break my life’s course with roots, stones and sand. Lowell McMullin

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Pleasure is like a river

• Pleasure is a river running to the sea; happiness is the full, calm sea. Peter Kreeft
• But pleasures are like poppies spread–You seize the flow’r, its bloom is shed; Or like the snow falls in the river–A moment white — then melts for ever. Robert Burns
• Pleasure

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Emotion is like a river that you must not dam up

• When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy. Rumi
• Hatred is toxic waste in the river of life. Micron
• Faith is like water in a river bed. The more you have, the smoother it flows over the rocks.
• Trying to control the emotional self wilfully by manipulative attempts is like trying to choose a number on a thrown die or to push back the water of the Kamo River upstream. Certainly, they end up aggravating their agony and feeling unbearable pain because of their failure in manipulating the emotions. Shoma Morita, M.D.
• Love is the river of life in the world. Henry Ward Beecher
• Tears are a river that takes you somewhere…Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace better. Clarissa Pinkola Estes
• You do not see the river of mourning because it lacks one tear of your own. Antonio Porchia
• A man who cannot get angry is like a stream that cannot overflow, that is always turbid. Sometimes indignation is as good as a thunderstorm in summer, clearing and cooling the air. Henry Ward Beecher
• Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained. Arthur Somers Roche
• Happiness consists in activity. It is a running stream, not a stagnant pool. John Mason Good
• Emotion

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Desires and attachments are like rivers

• Waters from many rivers continually flow into the ocean but the ocean never overfills. In a like manner, desires and attachments constantly flow into the mind of the Illuminated One, but he or she, like the ocean in its deepest depths, is totally still and never disturbed. Bhagavad Gita
• Desire

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Think of your life path and spiritual journey as a river

• Be soft in your practice. Think of the method as a fine silvery stream, not a raging waterfall. Follow the stream, have faith in its course. It will go its own way, meandering here, trickling there. It will find the grooves, the cracks, the crevices. Just follow it. Never let it out of your sight. It will take you. Sheng-yen
• To make the fastest progress, be an absolutely cheerful hero-warrior and take both victory and failure as parallel experience rivers leading to the sea of progress-delight. Sri Chinmoy
• A drop of water has the tastes of the water of the seven seas: there is no need to experience all the ways of worldly life. The reflections of the moon on one thousand rivers are from the same moon: the mind must be full of light. Hung Tzu Ch’eng
• If my ship sails from sight, it doesn’t mean my journey ends, it simply means the river bends. John Enoch Powell
• While the river of life glides along smoothly, it remains the same river; only the landscape on either bank seems to change. Max Muller
• The river is constantly turning and bending and you never know where it’s going to go and where you’ll wind up. Following the bend in the river and staying on your own path means that you are on the right track. Don’t let anyone deter you from that. Eartha Kitt
• It is not required that we know all of the details about every stretch of the river. Indeed, were we to know, it would not be an adventure, and I wonder if there would be much point in the journey. Jeffrey R. Anderson
• Many a calm river begins as a turbulent waterfall, yet none hurtles and foams all the way to the sea. Mikhail Lermontov
• I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don’t have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along. William Stafford
• Life is a journey

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Just as all rivers contain water, all spiritual paths contain truth

• 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
• Truth is a river that is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between the arms, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the main river.  Cyril Connolly
• Truth

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We all share the same river of life …

• Although we are in different boats, you in your boat and we in our canoe, we share the same river of life. Chief Oren Lyons
• To connect with the great river, we all need a path, but when you get down there there’s only one river. Matthew Fox
• Life in us is like the water in a river. Henry David Thoreau

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…. for the same river of consciousness flows though us all

• Within our consciousness is contained the wisdom of the ancestors, learned on their own explorations. Christ died for my sins. Buddha became enlightened so I, too, could become enlightened. Black Elk had visions so I could share his visions. We are all one tribe. We who live today receive the benefit of every spiritual act from every person who has ever lived. The river of consciousness flows through the minds of all, past and present. John Kehoe
• The river is everywhere. Hermann Hesse
• There’s a river somewhere that flows through the lives of everyone. Roberta Flack
• When time comes for us to again rejoin the infinite stream of water flowing to and from the great timeless ocean, our little droplet of soulful water will once again flow with the endless stream. William Marks
• Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. Norman Maclean
• Each is like a river that leaves behind its name and shape, the whole course of its path, to vanish into the vast sea of God. Richard Selzer
• You are a dynamic stream of consciousness, flowing freely, fully and fearlessly in, through and around the Universe in unlimited abundance. Reclaim your Spirit…  Robert Beno
• Consciousness

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The river is a particularly powerful metaphor for life’s flows

• The great river-courses which have shaped the lives of men have hardly changed; and those other streams, the life- currents that ebb and flow in human hearts, pulsate to the same great needs, the same great loves and terrors. As our thought follows close in the slow wake of the dawn, we are impressed with the broad sameness of the human lot, which never alters in the main headings of its history–hunger and labour, seed- time and harvest, love and death. George Eliot

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Flow with the river of life rather than rowing against it …

• Take a look at your natural river. What are you? Stop playing games with yourself. Where’s your river going? Are you riding with it? Or are you rowing against it? Don’t you see that there is no effort if you’re riding with your river? Frederick Carl Frieseke
• I believe in going with the flow. I don’t believe in fighting against the flow. You ride on your river and you go with the tides and the flow. But it has to be your river, not someone else’s. Everyone has their own river, and you don’t need to swim,float, sail on their’s, but you need to be in your own river and you need to go with it. And I don’t believe in fighting the wind. You go and you fly with your wind. Let everyone else catch their own gusts of wind and let them fly with their own gusts of wind, and you go and you fly with yours. JoyBell C.
• Make peace with where you are. You are where you are. When you make peace with where you are you turn downstream easily. When you don’t make peace with where you are you’re upstream. Abraham-Hicks
• Go with the flow

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… but there is nothing wrong with steering

• Some people drift along like a cork on a river, feeling that they cannot do anything except drift, moment to moment. This is an attitude of mind. Everyone can be constructive even in tiny ways. Edward de Bono
• We may be floating on Tao, but there is nothing wrong with steering. If Tao is like a river, it is certainly good to know where the rocks are. Deng Ming-Dao
• Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream. Malcolm Muggeridge

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Stop trying to direct the river’s flow

• You are learning too much, remembering too much, trying to hard… relax a little bit, give life a chance to flow its own way, unassisted by your mind and effort. Stop directing the river’s flow!  Mooji
• Don’t push the river, it flows anyway. Barry Stevens
• Don’t push the river—it flows by itself. Fritz Perls

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Time is a river and its flow is inexorable

• Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. Henry David Thoreau
• Time is a river, the resistless flow of all created things. One thing no sooner comes in sight than it is hurried past and another is borne along, only to be swept away in its turn. Marcus Aurelius
• Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away. Marcus Aurelius
• The moment – the now – is like a river, which carries you forward, ever-changing and ever moving. You either flow with this now or reject it and fight it, but that doesn’t stop the flow; it only determines your experience of it. Gina Lake
• Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. Jorge Luis Borges
• It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves. Thornton Wilder
• Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?” That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future. Hermann Hesse
• In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time. Leonardo da Vinci
• We are deep at the bottom of this river of time, caught up in the current of the moment where all the rivers rendezvous. Lynn Noel
• Time is a river without banks.
• 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

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Let what you do flow from you like a river

• May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children. Rainer Maria Rilke

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Let money flow into and out of you like a river

• If we stop the circulation of money — if our only intention is to hold on to our money and hoard it — since it is life energy, we will stop its circulation back into our lives as well. In order to keep that energy coming to us, we have to keep the energy circulating. Like a river, money must keep flowing, otherwise it begins to stagnate, to clog, to suffocate and strangle its very own life force. Circulation keeps it alive and vital. Deepak Chopra

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Thoughts on rivers and the ocean

• Each is like a river that leaves behind its name and shape, the whole course of its path, to vanish into the vast sea of God. Richard Selzer
• Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean. William Stafford
• Follow the river and you will find the sea. French Proverb
• For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one. Kahlil Gibran
• Many a calm river begins as a turbulent waterfall, yet none hurtles and foams all the way to the sea. Mikhail Lermontov
• No man is so poor as to have nothing worth giving: as well might the mountain streamlets say they have nothing to give the sea because they are not rivers. Give what you have. To someone it may be better than you dare to think. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• Pleasure is a river running to the sea; happiness is the full, calm sea. Peter Kreeft
• The nature of light is to shine. The way of the river is to return home to its sea. The essence of human is being. Chad Christopher Cobb
• The river is within us, the sea is all about us; The sea is the land’s edge also. S. Eliot
• The virtues are lost in self-interest as rivers are in the sea. La Rochefoucauld
• To make the fastest progress, be an absolutely cheerful hero-warrior and take both victory and failure as parallel experience rivers leading to the sea of progress-delight. Sri Chinmoy
• Waters from many rivers continually flow into the ocean but the ocean never overfills. In a like manner, desires and attachments constantly flow into the mind of the Illuminated One, but he or she, like the ocean in its deepest depths, is totally still and never disturbed. Bhagavad Gita
• Whatever be the qualities of the man with whom a woman is united according to the law, such qualities even she assumes, like a river, united with the ocean. Guru Nanak
• When time comes for us to again rejoin the infinite stream of water flowing to and from the great timeless ocean, our little droplet of soulful water will once again flow with the endless stream. William Marks
• One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure. Friedrich Nietzsche

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Proverbs

• You had better return home and make a net, than go down to the river and desire to get the fishes. Chinese Proverb
• No one tests the depth of a river with both feet. Proverb, Ashanti
• If you live in the river you should make friends with the crocodile. Indian Proverb
• A bird can roost but on one branch, a mouse can drink not more than its fill from a river. Chinese Proverbs
• Our love is like the misty rain that falls softly but floods the river. African Proverb
• Only when you have crossed the river can you say the crocodile has a lump on his snout. Ashanti Proverb
• Listen to the sound of the river and you will get a trout. Irish Proverb
• No river can return to its source, yet all rivers must have a beginning. Native American Prover
• Sit on the bank of a river and wait: Your enemy’s corpse will soon float by. Indian Proverb
• To rule the mountains is to rule the river. Proverb
• Enough shovels of earth – a mountain. Enough pails of water – a river. Chinese Proverbs
• Learning is like rowing upstream; not to advance is to drop back. Chinese Proverbs

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• Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt. Mark Twain
• Delta: A river with its mouth full of mud.
• Flood: A river too big for its bridges.
• Love is like a river flowing through your heart. I’ll bring the boat, if you bring the bridge. Jarod Kintz
• 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. W. H. Auden
• Angler: A man who spends rainy days sitting around on the muddy banks of rivers doing nothing because his wife won’t let him do it at home.

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