Best is water.
—Pindar, 476 BCFar water cannot quench near fire.
—Japanese proverbWater its living strength first shows, / When obstacles its course oppose.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1815If you stain clear water with filth, you will never find a drink.
—Aeschylus, 458 BCEvery fool becomes a philosopher after ten days of rain.
—Clover Adams, 1882He who would have clear water should go to the fountainhead.
—Italian proverbThere’s plenty of water in the universe without life, but nowhere is there life without water.
—Sylvia Alice Earle, 1995The United States has virtually set up an empire on impounded and redistributed water.
—Charles P. Berkey, 1946What water gives, water takes away.
—Portuguese proverbThe mill will never grind with water that is past.
—Daniel McCallum, 1870To gaze upon a drop of water is to behold the nature of all the waters of the universe.
—Huangbo Xiyun, c. 850Till taught by pain, / Men really know not what good water’s worth.
—Lord Byron, 1819The smell of rain is rich with life.
—Estela Portillo Trambley, 1975Iron may break gold, but water remains whole.
—Ge Hong, c. 300Water is the first principle of everything.
—Thales of Miletus, c. 600 BCHe knows the water best who has waded through it.
—Danish proverbWater, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1939Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
—W.H. Auden, 1957There’s folks ’ud hold a sieve under the pump and expect to carry away the water.
—George Eliot, 1859I came upon no wine, / So wonderful as thirst.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1923The waters are nature’s storehouse, in which she locks up her wonders.
—Izaak Walton, 1653If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.
—Margaret Atwood, 2005A fool and water will go the way they are diverted.
—Ethiopian proverbThese landscapes of water and reflection have become an obsession.
—Claude Monet, 1908Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain there would be no life.
—John Updike, 1989Every memory everyone has ever had will eventually be underwater.
—Anthony Doerr, 2006All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
—Toni Morrison, 1987Can you draw sweet water from a foul well?
—Brooks Atkinson, 1940No poems can please long, nor live, that are written by water drinkers.
—Horace, 35 BCWater astonishing and difficult altogether makes a meadow and a stroke.
—Gertrude Stein, 1914The thirsty earth soaks up the rain, / And drinks, and gapes for drink again.
—Abraham Cowley, 1656I drink for the thirst to come.
—François Rabelais, 1535Water has many ways of reminding us that when we are in it we are out of our element.
—Christopher Hitchens, 2008Seek not water, only show you are thirsty, / That water may spring up all around you.
—Rumi, c. 1260Too often, where we need water we find guns.
—Ban Ki-moon, 2008Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water.
—Zadie Smith, 2000When you drink water, think of its source.
—Chinese proverbThe history of the land has been written very largely in water.
—John Hodgdon Bradley Jr., 1935Spit not in the well; you may have to drink its water.
—French proverbIt is wretched business to be digging a well just as you’re dying of thirst.
—Plautus, c. 193 BCI ride rough waters and shall sink with no one to save me.
—Virginia Woolf, 1931Water is the readiest means of making friends with nature.
—Ludwig Feuerbach, 1841There is no small pleasure in sweet water.
—Ovid, c. 10