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I roamed the countryside searching for answers to things I did not understand. ~Leonardo da Vinci
Anybody can be good in the country. ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
When I am in the country I wish to vegetate like the country. ~William Hazlitt, Table Talk
I suppose the pleasure of country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live. ~Vita Sackville-West, Country Notes
It is only in the country that we can get to know a person or a book. ~Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave, 1945
God made the country, and man made the town. ~William Cowper, The Task
I have no relish for the country; it is a kind of healthy grave. ~Sydney Smith
People tell me that the countryside must always be stupid and backward, and I get angry, as if it were said that only townspeople had immortal souls, and that it was only in the city that the flame of divinity breathed into the first men had an unobscured glow. ~George William Russell
"No wise man will go to live in the country, unless he has something to do which can be better done in the country. For instance, if he is to shut himself up for a year to study science, it is better to look out to the fields, than to an opposite wall. Then, if a man walks out in the country, there is nobody to keep him from walking in again: but if a man walks out in London, he is not sure when he will walk in again. A great city is, to be sure, the school for studying life."
Boswell: Life
Our conversation turned upon living in the country, which Johnson, whose melancholy mind required the dissipation of quick successive variety, had habituated himself to consider as a kind of mental imprisonment. "Yet, Sir, (said I,) there are many people who are content to live in the country." Johnson: "Sir, it is in the intellectual world as in the physical world; we are told by natural philosophers that a body is at rest in the place that is fit for it; they who are content to live in the country, are fit for the country."
Boswell: Life
"There is scarcely any writer who has not celebrated the happiness of rural privacy, and delighted himself and his reader with the melody of birds, the whisper of groves, and the murmur of rivulets." Johnson: Rambler #135 (July 2, 1751)
"They who have already enjoyed the crowds and noise of the great city, know their desire to return is little more than the restlessness of a vacant mind, that they are not so much led by hope as driven by disgust, and wish rather to leave the country than to see the town."
Johnson: Idler #80 (October 27, 1759)
"The uniform necessities of human nature produce in a great measure uniformity of life, and for part of the day make one place like another; to dress and to undress, to eat and to sleep, are the same in London as in the country."
Johnson: Idler #80 (October 27, 1759)b][/b]
God's Warrior
Water - Rivers - Streams - Fountains
Water - Rivers - Streams - Fountains
The Twenty Third Psalm
The Lord is my shepherd,
I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside still waters...
- Psalm 23:1-2
Passions are likened best to floods and streams:
The shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb.
- Sir Walter Raleigh, 1552 - 1618
From the heart of this fountain of delights wells up some bitter taste to choke them even amid the flowers.
- Lucretius, 99 - 55 B.C.
Water is a good servant, but it is a cruel master.
- John Bullein, 1562
A river seems a magic thing. A magic, moving, living part of the very earth itself - for it is from the soil, both from its depth and from its surface, that a river has its beginning.
- Laura Gilpin
Soften my heart,
O God of living waters,
that the shower of Scripture
I am about to read
may enrich the soil of my soul.
Rain down your wisdom
in sacred streams
to carry me like an upturned leaf
through the currents of this gray day.
Amen.
Edward Hays, Prayers for a Planetary Pilgrim
The watering of a garden requires as much judgment
as the seasoning of a soup.
- Helena Rutherford Ely
I came where the river
Ran over stones;
My ears knew
An early joy.
And all the waters
Of all the streams
Sang in my veins
That summer day.
Theodore Roethke, The Waking, 1948
No one can see their reflection in running water.
It is only in still water that we can see.
- Taoist proverb
We have been quick to assume rights to use water but slow to
recognize obligations to preserve and protect it... In short, we
need a water ethic--a guide to right conduct in the face of
complex decisions about natural systems we do not
and cannot fully understand.
- Sandra Postel, Last Oasis:
Facing Water Scarcity
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, Voyages: Canada's Heritage Rivers
According to Democritus, truth lies at the bottom of a well, the water of which serves as a mirror in which objects may be reflected. I have heard, however, that some philosophers, in seeking for truth, to pay homage to her, have seen their own image and adored it instead.- Charles Richter
Constant dripping hollows out a stone.
- Lucretius
It is a fascinating and provocative thought that a body of water
deserves to be considered as an organism in its own right.
- Lyall Watson, Supernature
What runs but never gets tired?
Water
To enjoy freedom ... we have of course to control ourselves.
We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly,
squirting half the house in order to water a single rose.
- Freedom alone is not enough without light to read at night,
without time or access to water to irrigate your farm,
without the ability to catch fish to feed your family.
- Nelson Mandela
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.
The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.
- Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It
Pity! The southerly trees have shed their leaves.
Nobody comes to appreciate the mountain's beauty.
Tomorrow I too will float away.
My reflection gone from cool streams.
- Cheng Man-ch'ing, 1933
I have left almost to the last the magic of water, an element which owing to its changefulness of form and mood and color and to the vast range of its effects is ever the principal source of landscape beauty, and has like music a mysterious influence over the mind.
- Sir George Sitwell, On the Making of Gardens, 1909
Water ... which though not absolutely necessary to a beautiful composition, yet occurs so often, and is so capital a feature, that is is always regretted when wanting; and no large place can be supposed, a little spot can hardly be imagined in which it may not be agreeable; it accommodates itself to every situation; is the most interesting object in a landscape, and the happiest circumstance in a retired recess; captivates the eye at a distance; invites approach, and is delightful when near; it refreshes an open exposure; it animates a shade; cheers the dreariness of a waste, and enriches the most crowded view;
in form, in style, and in extent, may be made equal to the greatest compositions, or adapted to the least; it may spread in a calm expanse to sooth the tranquillity of a peaceful scene; or hurrying along a devious course, add splendor to a gay, and
extravagance to a romantic situation.
- Thomas Whately, Observations on Modern Gardening, 1770
lowing water never goes bad;
our doorways never gather termites.
- Chinese Proverbs
Expect poison from the standing water.
- William Blake
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 Mississippi River carries the mud of thirty states and two
provinces 2,000 miles south to the delta and deposits 500
million tons of it there every year. The business of the
Mississippi, which it will accomplish in time, is methodically
to transport all of Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico.
- Charles Kuralt
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
is a strong brown god–sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognized as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities--ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons, and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonored, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
- T. S. Eliot, Dry Salvages
When oxygen and hydrogen find one another, their joining produces fiery passion. Out of this fire, water is born. Quaint Victorian chemistry gives us an image of one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms in a fixed molecule that bounces around from place to place. The reality of water is not so orderly. The hydrogen atoms are not owned by any particular oxygen atom. Water is a substance very much in love with itself, and the atoms connect in webs and clusters where oxygen shares around the hydrogen atoms freely, a fluid situation indeed.
- Ian D. Anderson, Ian Lurking Bear
It is the sea that whitens the roof.
The sea drifts through the winter air.
It is the sea that the north wind makes.
The sea is in the falling snow.
- Wallace Stevens, The Man With the Blue Guitar
Nearly 97% of the world's water is salty or otherwise undrinkable. Another 2% is locked in ice caps and glaciers. Only 1% can be used for all agricultural, residential, manufacturing, community and personal needs.
- Drinking Water Week
To serve the cause of water adequately... We must get to know it in its true being. And how do we do this? Why, by treating it in the very way exemplified by its own behavior; that is, whenever we encounter it, we wash the tablet of our souls clean of all other impressions in order to allow the being of water to make its imprint on us.
- Theodor Schwenk, Water: The Element of Life
What would the world be, once bereft of wet and wildness?
Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
In the time that I have been acquainted with this region I have become increasingly aware of it as a testament of water, the origin and guide of its contours and gradients and of all the lives - the plants and small creatures, and the culture - that evolved here. That was always here to be seen, of course, and the recognition has forced itself, in one form or other, upon people in every part of the world who have been directly involved with the growing of living things. The gardener who ignores it is soon left with no garden.
- W. S. Merwin, A Shape of Water, 1997
Next to blood relationships, come water relationships.
- Stanley Crawford, Mayordomo
- The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy; neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
- John W. Gardner
To the waters, and the wild, with a Faerie, hand in hand,
for the world is more full of weeping ... than you can understand.- W.B. Yeats
A life all turbulence and noise may seem
To him that leads it wise and to be praised,
But wisdom is a pearl with most success
Sought in still waters.
- William Cowper, The Task
Even stones under
mountain waterfalls compose
odes to plum blossoms.
- Onitsura
When you hear the splash
Of the water drops that fall
Into the stone bowl
You will feel that all the dust
Of your mind is washed away.
- Sen-No-Rikyu
Water flows humbly to the lowest level.
Nothing is weaker than water,
Yet for overcoming what is hard and strong,
Nothing surpasses it.
- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Americans drink more than one billion glasses of tap water per day.
Till last by Philip's farm I flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.
- Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Brook
Do not bathe if there is no water.
- Shan proverb
It is water, in every form and at every scale, that saturates the mind. All the water that will ever be is, right now.
- National Geographic, October 1993
Life processes take place in an aqueous medium. All organisms are composed mostly of water, whether they dwell in the oceans, lakes, and rivers, or on the land. Because the physical and chemical properties of water are well suited to the requirements of life, it is no accident that life is a water-based phenomenon.
- Robert E. Ricklefs, Ecology
Any river is really the summation of the whole valley.
To think of it as nothing but water is to ignore the greater part. Hal Borland, This Hill, This Valley
The river Rhine, it is well known,
Doth wash your city of Cologne;
But tell me, nymphs! what power divine
Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine?
- Samuel T. Coleridge 1772-1834, Cologne
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, Lifelines
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.
- Saint Augustine
A corn field of one acre gives off 4,000 gallons of water per day in evaporation.
It takes about 6 gallons of water to grow a single serving of lettuce. More than 2,600 gallons is required to produce a single serving of steak.
We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.
- Jacques Cousteau
The sound of the water says what I think.
- Chuang Tzu
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, Last Oasis: Facing Water Scarcity
