River Sayings and Quotes

Rivers are more than the place for a nice kayak ride or fishing trip, they’re often used as metaphors for life. We’re constantly flowing from one moment or milestone to the next, unable to stop the tide of time. Below you’ll find a collection of wise and insightful river quotes.

Time Flows Away Like the Water in the River. Confucius
You can’t argue with a river – it is going to flow. You can dam it up, put it to useful purposes, you can deflect it, but you can’t argue with it. Dean Acheson
Life is like the river, sometimes it sweeps you gently along and sometimes the rapids come out of nowhere. Emma Smith
Anger was washed away in the river along with any obligation. Ernest Hemingway
Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid. Francis Bacon
The virtues are lost in self-interest as rivers are lost in the sea. Franklin D. Roosevelt
Being all alone is like the feeling you get when you stand at the mouth of a large river on a rainy evening and watch the water flow into the sea. Have you ever done that? Stand at the mouth of a large river and watch the water flow into the sea? Haruki Murakami
Who hears the rippling of rivers will not utterly despair of anything. Henry David Thoreau
The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. Henry David Thoreau
Love is the river of life in this world. Henry Ward Beecher
The river has taught me to listen, from it you will learn it as well. It knows everything, the river, everything can be learned from it. See, you've already learned this from the water too, that it is good to strive downwards, to sink, to seek the depth. Herman Hesse
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
A river cuts through rock, not because of its power, but because of its persistence. Jim Watkins
Rivers have what man most respects and longs for in his own life and thought a capacity for renewal and replenishment, continual energy, creativity, cleansing. John M. Kauffmann
The sun shines not on us but in us. The Rivers flow not past, but through us. John Muir
I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding. John O’Donohue
In the end, our society will be defined not only by what we create but by what we refuse to destroy. John Sawhill
We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not. Ah, well! we may conjecture many things. John Wesley Powell
Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it's a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it's a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. Jorge Luis Borges
For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one. Khalil Gibran
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance. Khalil Gibran
I had no plans of any destination. I wish to flow like a river. Lailah Gifty Akita
A river seems a magic thing. A magic, moving, living part of the very earth itself. Laura Gilpin
When you put your hand in a flowing stream, you touch the last that has gone before and the first of what is still to come. Leonardo DaVinci
If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: ‘President Can’t Swim. Lyndon B. Johnson
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
The river has great wisdom and whispers it's secrets to the hearts of men. Mark Twain
You drown not by falling into a river, but by staying submerged in it. Paulo Coelho
But the time has also come to identify and preserve free flowing stretches of our great scenic rivers before growth and development make the beauty of the unspoiled waterway a memory. President Lyndon Johnson'
No river can return to its source, yet all rivers must have a beginning. Proverb