Quotes & Sayings About Earth And Water

For the elements have the property of moving back to their place in a straight line, but they have no properties which would cause them to remain where they are, or to move other-wise than in a straight line, These rectilinear motions of these four elements when returning to their original place are are of two kinds, either centrifugal,vziz.>the motion of the air and the fire; or centripedal,viz.> the motion of the earth, and the water; and when the elements have reached their original place, they remain at rest. — Maimonides

May the wind carry her spirit gently May the Fire release her soul, May the Water cleanse her, may the Earth receive her, May the Goddess take her in her arms and guide her to rebirth. — Starhawk

The best recipe for happiness and contentment I've seen is this: dig a big hole in the garden of your thoughts and put into it all your disillusions, disappointments, regrets, worries, troubles, doubts, and fears. Cover well with the earth of fruitfulness. Water it from the well of contentment. Sow on top the seeds of hope, courage, strength, patience, and love. Then when the time for gathering comes, may your harvest be a rich and fruitful one. — Zig Ziglar

And the earth itself still turning on its axis and revolving around that sun, the sun revolving around the luminous wheel of this galaxy, the countless unmeasured jewelled wheels of countless unmeasured galaxies, turning, turning, majestically, into infinity, into eternity, through all of which all life ran on - all this, long after she herself was dead, men would still be reading in the night sky, and as the earth turned through those distant seasons, and they watched the constellations still rising, culminating, setting, to rise again - Aries, Taurus, Gemini, the Crab, Leo, Virgo, the Scales and the Scorpion, Capricorn the Sea-goat and Aquarius the Water Bearer, Pisces, and once more, triumphantly, Aries! - would they not, too, still be asking the hopeless eternal question: to what end? What force drives this sublime celestial machinery? — Malcolm Lowry

Now you must cast aside your laziness,"
my master said, "for he who rests on down
or under covers cannot come to fame;
and he who spends his life without renown
leaves such a vestige of himself on earth
as smoke bequeaths to air or foam to water.
Therefore, get up; defeat your breathlessness
with spirit that can win all battles if
the body's heaviness does not deter it.
A longer ladder still is to be climbed;
it's not enough to have left them behind;
if you have understood, now profit from it. — Dante Alighieri

He described to her the house he had built for himself, in outside appearance a shack, but delightful inside, at least to him. A sleeping loft with a little round window. Everything he needed right where he could put his hand to it, out in the open, nothing in cupboards. A short walk from the house he had a bathtub sunk in the earth, in the middle of a bed of sweet herbs. He would carry hot water to it by the pailful and lounge there under the stars, even in the winter. He grew vegetables, and shared them with the deer.
(From the story "Powers") — Alice Munro

Earth as we know it came into being through its four great components: land, water, air, and life, all interacting in the light and energy of the sun. Although there was a sequence in the formation of the land sphere, the atmosphere, the water sphere, and the life sphere, these have so interacted with one another in the shaping of the Earth that we must somehow think of these as all present to one another and interacting from the beginning. — Thomas Berry

After you're dead and buried and floating around whatever place we go to, what's going to be your best memory of earth? What one moment for you defines what it's like to be alive on this planet. What's your takeaway? Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don't count. I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you're really alive. — Douglas Coupland

Shadow and dust shall be reclaimed, earth sealing the tomb from which you came. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, warrior return, breathe your last. Air, earth, fire, water, hear my voice, obey my order, thrice around your grave do bound, evil sink into the ground. I now invoke the law of three, this is my will, so mote it be. — Christine Feehan

We are animal. We are Earth. We are water. We are a community of human beings living on this planet together. And we forget that. We become disconnected, we lose our center point of gravity, that stillness that allows us to listen to life on a deeper level and to meet each other in a fully authentic and present way. — Terry Tempest Williams

Transformations
All night he ran, his body air,
But that was in another year.
Lately the answered shape of his laughter,
The shape of his smallest word, is fire.
He who is a fierce young crier
Of poems will be as tranquil as water,
Keeping, in sunset glow, the pure
Image of limitless desire;
Then enter earth and come to be,
Inch by inch, geography. — Stanley Kunitz

And then there are the cravings.. Oh, la! A woman may crave to be near water, or be belly down, her face in the earth, smelling the wild smell. She might have to drive into the wind. She may have to plant something, pull things out of the ground or put them into the ground. She may have to knead and bake, rapt in dough up to her elbows.
She may have to trek into the hills, leaping from rock to rock trying out her voice against the mountain. She may need hours of starry nights where the stars are like face powder spilt on a black marble floor. She may feel she will die if she doesn't dance naked in a thunderstorm, sit in perfect silence, return home ink-stained, paint-stained, tear-stained, moon-stained. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The wife of a junior officer cooped up in a horrible canvas partition in steerage for five months wrote:
"I had enjoyed much peace there in the absence of every comfort, even of such as are now enjoyed in jail. I used to say that there were four privations in my situation - fire, water, earth and air. No fire to warm oneself on the coldest day, no water to drink but what was tainted, no earth to set the foot on, and scarcely any air to breathe. Yet, with all these miserable circumstances, we spent many a happy hour by candlelight in that wretched cabin whilst I sewed and he read the Bible to me. — Stephen Taylor

How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes. It hangs like a glass cage. It is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny jar. There is a spark there. Next moment a flush of dun. Then a vapour as if earth were breathing in and out, once, twice, for the first time. Then under the dullness someone walks with a green light. Then off twists a white wraith. The woods throb blue and green, and gradually the fields drink in red, gold, brown. Suddenly a river snatches a blue light. The earth absorbs colour like a sponge slowly drinking water. It puts on weight; rounds itself; hangs pendent; settles and swings beneath our feet. — Virginia Woolf

A continent ages quickly once we come. The natives live in harmony with it. But the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water, so that the water supply is altered, and in a short time the soil, once the sod is turned under, is cropped out and, next, it starts to blow away as it has blown away in every old country and as I had seen it start to blow in Canada. The earth gets tired of being exploited. — Ernest Hemingway,

The flow of the river is ceaseless; and its water is never the same.
The foam that floats in the pools
Now gathering, now vanishing
Never lasts long. So it is with man
and all his dwelling places on this earth. — Kamo No Chomei

The earth will never be the same again
Rock, water, tree, iron, share this greif
As distant stars participate in the pain.
A candle snuffed, a falling star or leaf,
A dolphin death, O this particular loss
A Heaven-mourned; for if no angel cried
If this small one was tossed away as dross,
The very galaxies would have lied.
How shall we sing our love's song now
In this strange land where all are born to die?
Each tree and leaf and star show how
The universe is part of this one cry,
Every life is noted and is cherished,
and nothing loved is ever lost or perished. — Madeleine L'Engle

The real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife. To utilize them for present needs while insuring their preservation for future generations requires a delicately balanced and continuing program, based on the most extensive research. Their administration is not properly, and cannot be, a matter of politics. — Rachel Carson

On a clear day the Oregon coast is the most beautiful place on earth - clear and crisp and clean, a rich green in the land and a bright blue in the sky, the air fat and salty and bracing, the ocean spreading like a grin. Brown pelicans rise and fall in their chorus lines in the wells of the waves, cormorants arrow, an eagle kingly queenly floats south high above the water line. — Brian Doyle

3And in those days a whirlwind carried me off from the earth, and set me down at the end of the heavens. 4There I saw another vision, the dwelling-places of the holy and the righteous. 5Here my eyes saw their dwellings with His righteous angels and the holy. And they asked, interceded, and prayed for the children of men, and righteousness flowed before them like water, and mercy like dew upon the earth. Thus it is among them forever. — Ken Johnson

Millions upon millions of years ago, when the continents were already formed and the principal features of the earth had been decided, there existed, then as now, one aspect of the world that dwarfed all other ... a mighty ocean, resting uneasily to the east of the largest continent, a restless ever-changing, gigantic body of water that would later be described as Pacific. — James A. Michener

Humans build their societies around consumption of fossil water long buried in the earth, and these societies, being based on temporary resources, face the problem of being temporary themselves. — Charles Bowden

The remarkable thing about the world of insects, however, is precisely that there is no veil cast over these horrors. These are mysteries performed in broad daylight before our very eyes; we can see every detail, and yet they are still mysteries. If, as Heraclitus suggests, god, like an oracle, neither "declares nor hides, but sets forth by signs," then clearly I had better be scrying the signs. The earth devotes an overwhelming proportion of its energy to these buzzings and leaps in the grass. Theirs is the biggest wedge of the pie: Why? I ought to keep a giant water bug in an aquarium on my dresser, so I can think about it. — Annie Dillard

Every wave is a water sprite who swims in the current, each current is a path which snakes towards my palace, and my palace is fluidly built at the bottom of the lake, in the triangle of earth, fire and water. — Emile Zola

After a time, he felt a deeper rhythm, the rhythm of the stone and water, not the rhythm of his words and heartbeat. He breathed into this deeper rhythm, let it teach him a new mantra, a wordless mantra that waxed and waned, ebbed and flowed, moon and stars and clouds, river and sun, the wordless singing of the earth beneath it all like the world's own heartbeat. He laid his palms flat on the stone beneath him and listened in quiet rapture to the mantra of the world's praying. — Katherine Addison

Decide for yourselves as to what you should thing of those who say there is God, that he is the preserver of justice and that he is the protector of all, even after seeing the practice of untouchablity in the form of man being banned from human sight and contact, from walking into the streets, from entering the temples and drawing water from a tank, is rampant in the land, and yet that land is not spared from being razed by an earthquake, burnt by the fiery lava of a volcano, engulfed in a deluge from the ocean, submerged in the chasm of the earth, or fragemented by thunder-storm. — Periyar E.V. Ramasamy

In the Great Deluge in the days of Noah, nearly all mankind perished, eight persons alone being saved in the Ark. In our days a deluge, not of water but of sins, continually inundates the earth, and out of this deluge very few escape. Scarcely anyone is saved. — Alphonsus Liguori

As the days go on toward July, the earth becomes dry and all the flowers begin to thirst for moisture. Then from the hillside, some warm, still evening, the sweet rain-song of the robin echoes clear, and next day we wake up to a dim morning; soft flecks of cloud bar the sun's way, fleecy vapors steal across the sky, the southwest wind blows lightly, rippling the water into little waves that murmur melodiously as they kiss the shore. — Celia Thaxter

I am the executioner. When the crime is committed and the Lord God does not take vengeance nor does the exalted State move to declare and then to punish, I say when these bitter events happen, then comes the time for the executioner to declare himself or herself as the case may be. I have waited long enough. So the time has come, and I declare myself the executioner. The three criminals are hereby sentenced to death. By fire. By earth. By water. — Jay Bennett

Bad, or good, as it happens to be, that is what it is to exist! ... It is as though I have been silent and fuddled with sleep all my life. In spite of all, I know now that at least it is better to go always towards the summer, towards those burning seas of light; to sit at night in the forecastle lost in an unfamiliar dream, when the spirit becomes filled with stars, instead of wounds, and good and compassionate and tender. To sail into an unknown spring, or receive one's baptism on storm's promontory, where the solitary albatross heels over in the gale, and at last come to land. To know the earth under one's foot and go, in wild delight, ways where there is water. — Malcolm Lowry

I can see you have a great deal of water in your personality. Water never waits. It changes shape and flows around things, and finds the secret paths no one else has thought about
the tiny hole through the roof or the bottom of the box. There's no doubt it's the most versatile of the five elements. It can wash away earth; it can put out fire; it can wear a piece of metal down and sweep it away. Even wood, which is its natural complement, can't survive without being nurtured by water. And yet, you haven't drawn on those strengths in living your life, have you? — Arthur Golden

This beach I voyage on leads me through the earth's immortal consistencies. Each form I encounter obeys the principles of perfection and trial, a timelessness in the making. The proportions of truth are at hand. Existence is celebrated in a splinter of driftwood, worn by wind-driven sand into the shape of an arrow. The onshore waves jostle each other, busy with their eternal changing, mixing crab shells, sand grains, and fish bones together. The trim little shorebirds feeding at the water's edge are acutely aware of one another, under the light and shadow leaning and drifting over all awareness. Wither own mysteries behind their beady eyes, their quick, advantageous movements, they follow the great, unifying sea." ~ John Hay. Bird of Light. — John Hay

A wind blew, and the sand around his drawing scattered. He wrapped his fingers inside his wife's, and Father Time rekindled a connection he had only ever had with her. He surrendered to that sensation and felt the final drops of their lives touch one another, like water in a cave, top meets bottom, Heaven meets Earth.
As their eyes closed, a different set of eyes opened, and they rose from the ground as a shared south, up and up, a sun and a moon in a single sky. — Mitch Albom

On the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time.But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were fat more intelligent than man, for precisely the same reason — Douglas Adams

Gray stones for Abnegation, water for Erudite, earth for Amity, lit coals for Dauntless, and glass for Candor. — Veronica Roth

Anaximenes ... also says that the underlying nature is one and infinite ... but not undefined as Anaximander said but definite, for he identifies it as air; and it differs in its substantial nature by rarity and density. Being made finer it becomes fire; being made thicker it becomes wind, then cloud, then (when thickened still more) water, then earth, then stones; and the rest come into being from these. — Theophrastus

there's a universe swirling inside you. you have to learn to be your own earth, wind, fire and water. you are a natural phenomenon - not a natural disaster. — K.Y. Robinson

Rhythms appear in the ways flowers grow, water flows, the earth moves around the sun, the moon moves through their dreams, and thoughts travel within their minds. — Blue Balliett

Between earth and earth's atmosphere, the amount of water remains constant; there is never a drop more, never a drop less. This is a story of circular infinity, of a planet birthing itself. — Linda Hogan

A double-edged sword
One side destroys
One releases
I am your Gordian knot
Will you release or destroy me?
Follow truth and you shall:
Find me on water
Purify me through fire
Trapped by earth nevermore
Air will whisper to you
What spirit already knows:
That even shattered
anything is possible
If you believe
Then we shall both be free. — Kristin Cast

The process of dying begins with the dissolution of the elements within the body. It has eight stages, beginning with the dissolution of the earth element, then the water, fire and windelements. The color: appearance of a white vision, increase of the red element, black near-attainment, and finally the clear light of death. — Dalai Lama

I assure you, there needs to be no place on Earth where people cannot have access to clean, pure water - and whatever else is needed to "make life work" - if the people of Earth simply cared enough about each other. — Neale Donald Walsch

People are shaped by the earth and water around them. — Lisa See

The earth itself was unchangeable, the endless tracts of sand and water and pavement. It was the people, the perturbable madmen who roamed its surface, who viewed the world as transient and broken. Everett wished the earth could somehow reach up and still them, the crazy people, and invest them with its silence and permanence and depth. — Jonathan Lethem

The perfume that her body exhaled was of the quality of that earth-flesh, fungi, which smells of captured dampness and yet is so dry, overcast with the odour of oil of amber, which is an inner malady of the sea, making her seem as if she had invaded a sleep incautious and entire. Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, broad, porous and sleep-worn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface. About her head there was an effulgence as of phosphorous glowing about the circumference of a body of water - as if her life lay through her in ungainly luminous deteriorations - the troubling structure of the born somnambule. — Djuna Barnes

Moving in space, the atoms originally were individual units, but inevitable they began to collide with each other, and in cases where their shapes were such as to permit them to interlock, they began to form clusters. Water, air, fire, and earth, these are simply different clusters of the changeless atoms. — Democritus

Oh fair enough are sky and plain,
But I know fairer far:
Those are as beautiful again
That in the water are;
The pools and rivers wash so clean
The trees and clouds and air,
The like on earth was never seen,
And oh that I were there.
These are the thoughts I often think
As I stand gazing down
In act upon the cressy brink
To strip and dive and drown;
But in the golden-sanded brooks
And azure meres I spy
A silly lad that longs and looks
And wishes he were I. — A.E. Housman

The children are in love but do not know with what. They talk in gibberish, muse themselves into an indefinable pallor, and when they are completely at a loss they invent a language that maddens them. My fish. My hook. My fox. My snare. My fire. You my water. You my current. My earth. You my if. And you my but. Either. Or. My everything ... my everything ... They push one another, go for each other with their fists and scuffle over a counter-word that doesn't exist. — Ingeborg Bachmann

For Equilibrium, a Blessing:
Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,
May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul.
As the wind loves to call things to dance,
May your gravity by lightened by grace.
Like the dignity of moonlight restoring the earth,
May your thoughts incline with reverence and respect.
As water takes whatever shape it is in,
So free may you be about who you become.
As silence smiles on the other side of what's said,
May your sense of irony bring perspective.
As time remains free of all that it frames,
May your mind stay clear of all it names.
May your prayer of listening deepen enough
to hear in the depths the laughter of god. — John O'Donohue

Water-based life is very much an Earth-centric view, and we can push the envelope on that here in our own solar system. We have the methane seas of Titan. — Ellen Stofan

To make bread or love, to dig in the earth, to feed an animal or cook for a stranger - these activities require no extensive commentary, no lucid theology. All they require is someone willing to bend, reach, chop, stir. Most of these tasks are so full of pleasure that there is no need to complicate things by calling them holy. And yet these are the same activities that change lives, sometimes all at once and sometimes more slowly, the way dripping water changes stone. In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life. — Barbara Brown Taylor

The first glance from the eyes of the beloved is like the spirit that moved upon the face of the waters, giving birth to heaven and earth. — Khalil Gibran

The gods made the earth for all men t' share. Only when the kings come with their crowns and steel swords, they claimed it was all theirs. "My trees," they said, "you can't eat them apples. My stream, you can't fish here. My wood, you're not t' hunt. My earth, my water, my castle, my daughter, keep your hands away or I'll chop 'em off, but maybe if you kneel t' me I'll let you have a sniff." You call us thieves, but at least a thief has t' be brave and clever and quick. A kneeler only has t' kneel. — George R R Martin

Everything we think about regarding sustainability - from energy to agriculture to manufacturing to population - has a water footprint. Almost all of the water on Earth is salt water, and the remaining freshwater supplies are split between agricultural use and human use - as well as maintaining the existing natural environment. — Jamais Cascio

But civilized human beings are alarmingly ignorant of the fact that they are continuous with their natural surroundings. It is as necessary to have air, water, plants, insects, birds, fish, and mammals as it is to have brains, hearts, lungs, and stomachs. The former are our external organs in the same way that the latter are our internal organs. If then, we can no more live without the things outside than without those inside, the plain inference is that the words "I" and "myself " must include both sides. The sun, the earth, and the forests are just as much features of your own body as your brain. Erosion of the soil is as much a personal disease as leprosy, and many "growing communities" are as disastrous as cancer. — Alan W. Watts

The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year. — Henry Beston

Set the basketball on the kitchen table. Open a cupboard, get out a bottle of sesame seeds, and place a single seed beside the basketball. If you were to reduce the Earth to the size of a basketball, all the fresh surface water on the planet - all those rivers and lakes and ponds and streams - would fit inside that one tiny sesame seed. Add a second sesame seed; now you have all the usable underground water as well. Is fresh water a scarce resource? — William Ashworth

Perhaps the most impressive illustration of all is to suppose that you could label the molecules in a tumbler of water ... threw it anywhere you please on the earth, and went away from the earth for a few million years while all the water on the earth, the oceans, rivers, lakes and clouds had had time to mix up perfectly. Now supposing that perfect mixing had taken place, you come back to earth and draw a similar tumbler of water from the nearest tap, how many of those marked molecules would you expect to find in it? Well, the answer is 2000. There are 2000 times more molecules in a tumbler of water than there are tumblers of water in the whole earth. — Francis William Aston

Isn't that what truth is? The force of a person's believing seeps into those around him - into the very earth and air and water - until there's nothing else. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Recognize and respect Earth's beautiful systems of balance, between the presence of animals on land, the fish in the sea, birds in the air, mankind, water, air, and land. Most importantly there must always be awareness of the actions by people that can disturb this precious balance. — Margaret Mead

My plan is to open five restaurants based on the five elements in Chinese philosophy: wood, water, fire, earth and metal. — Arthur Potts Dawson

And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes-how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. — Albert Camus

The physical heart, which houses the spiritual heart, beats about 100,000 times a day, pumping two gallons of blood per minute and over 100 gallons per hour. If one were to attempt to carry 100 gallons of water (whose density is lighter than blood) from one place to another, it would be an exhausting task. Yet the human heart does this every hour of every day for an entire lifetime without respite. The vascular system transporting life-giving blood is over 60,000 miles long - more than two times the circumference of the earth. So when we conceive of our blood being pumped throughout our bodies, know that this means that it travels through 60,000 miles of a closed vascular system that connects all the parts of the body - all the vital organs and living tissues - to this incredible heart. — Hamza Yusuf

Why, if there is anything in supply and demand, life is the cheapest thing in the world. There is only so much water, so much earth, so much air; but the life that is demanding to be born is limitless. Nature is a spendthrift. Look at the fish and their millions of eggs. For that matter, look at you and me. In our loins are the possibilities of millions of lives. Could we but find time and opportunity and utilize the last bit and every bit of the unborn life that is in us, we could become the fathers of nations and populate continents. Life? Bah! It has no value. Of cheap things it is the cheapest. Everywhere it goes begging. Nature spills it out with a lavish hand. Where there is room for one life, she sows a thousand lives, and it's life eats life till the strongest and most piggish life is left. — Jack London

We are the planet, fully as much as water, earth, fire and air are the planet, and if the planet survives, it will only be through heroism. Not occasional heroism, a remarkable instance of it here and there, but constant heroism, systematic heroism, heroism as governing principle. — Russell Banks

[On the propulsive force of rockets] One part of fire takes up as much space as ten parts of air, and one part of air takes up the space of ten parts of water, and one part of water as much as ten parts of earth. Now powder is earth, consisting of the four elementary principles, and when the sulfur conducts the fire into the dryest part of the powder, fire, and air increase ... the other elements also gird themselves for battle with each other and the rage of battle is changed by their heat and moisture into a strong wind. — Vannoccio Biringuccio

And for adults, the world of fantasy books returns to us the great words of power which, in order to be tamed, we have excised from our adult vocabularies. These words are the pornography of innocence, words which adults no longer use with other adults, and so we laugh at them and consign them to the nursery, fear masking as cynicism. These are the words that were forged in the earth, air, fire, and water of human existence, and the words are:
Love. Hate. Good. Evil. Courage. Honor. Truth. — Jane Yolen

It's a perfect wave when small and the most beautiful and scary wave on Earth when it's big, as the swell from deep water hits the shallow reef ledge. A ten-foot high wave and a 30-footer break in the same depth of water. — Kelly Slater

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons. — Douglas Adams

Our world isn't made of earth, air and water or even molecules and atoms; our world is made of language. — Tom Robbins

Our world; and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely one seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin. It has air and water and all that is necessary — H.G.Wells

Earth: the things that are solid, absorbed and still.
Water: the things that are fluid, changing and unpredictable.
Wind: the things that shift, evolve and challenge.
Fire: the things that damage, devastate and distroy.
The void: the things that are present through their absence — Elif Shafak

The desert takes our dreams away from us, and they don't always return ... Those who don't return become a part of the clouds, a part of the animals that hide in the ravines and of the water that comes from the earth. They become part of everything ... They become the Soul of the World. — Paul Coelho

The ancient trees are the deep earth's language for speaking to the universe. The earth communicates through trees to the animals and to the birds living above - and to the very heavens. The trees draw the earth's water up from the ground. Then breathing, they return it to the air for the clouds and the blessed rain that falls to begin the cycle anew. She thinks of the thin layer of living things as a fragile space between earth's molten rock core and the frozen outer universe of stars. The thin layer is like her own life here - precious, finite — J.J. Brown

And on the moon there is surely water ... And up there, if water exists, and air, then so does life.
A life perhaps different from ours. Perhaps that water has the flavor of (let us say) glycyrrhizin, or cardamon, or even of pepper. If there are infinite worlds, this proves the infinite ingenuity of the Engineer of our Universe, but then there is no limit to this Poet. He can have created inhabited worlds everywhere, but inhabited by ever-different creatures. Perhaps the inhabitants of the sun are sunnier, brighter, and more illuminated than are the inhabitants of the earth, who are heavy with matter, and the inhabitants of the moon lie somewhere in between. On the sun live beings who are all Form, or all Act, if you prefer, while on the earth beings are made of mere Potentials that evolve, and on the moon they are in medio fluctuantes, lunatics, so to speak ... — Umberto Eco

I had always heard rumors of her, Nanook thought, she who can control the wind, the water, the earth, and fire ... she who can talk to time. But those were old myths of a woman who lived many thousands of years ago, the first daughter of the Earth. There is a prophecy that she will return again, during the end times -- every religion has someone like that, someone to wait for and put your faith in, but my culture had mostly covered up her existence. We had a god of the sea, a god of the land, a god of the air, a god of fire, but no one who could control all of the elements. We spoke, only in whispers, of the ancient bloodline -- the descendents of the Great Mother. Too many superstitious minds, too many men concerned only with their own power and position, had heard these whispers in the past and taken gruesome steps to erase the descendents. The lineage was said to be broken, the blood of the Great Mother spilled for the last time. — Sarah Warden

I tell you the truth - for a long, long time these farmers have worked like horses and cattle; and like horses and cattle they have died. The reason our religion has penetrated this territory like water flowing into dry earth is that it has given this group of people a human warmth they never previously knew. For the first time they have met men who treated them like human beings. It was the human kindness and charity of the fathers that touched their hearts. — Shusaku Endo

Air all around him, there was air in the water, all elements were one, fire and earth, air and water. All are but one thing, not four, not two, and not three, but one. He — Holly Black

You told me once of the plants that lie dormant through the drought, that wait, half-dead, deep in the earth. The plants that wait for the rain. You said they'd wait for years, if they had to; that they'd almost kill themselves before they grew again. But as soon as those first drops of water fall, those plants begin to stretch and spread their roots. They travel up through the soil and sand to reach the surface. There's a chance for them again. — Lucy Christopher

From the mountain peaks for streams descend and flow near the town; in the cascades the white water is calling, but the mistis do not hear it. On the hillsides, on the plains, on the mountaintops the yellow flowers dance in the wind, but the mistis hardly see them. At dawn, against the cold sky, beyond the edge of the mountains, the sun appears; then the larks and doves sing, fluttering their little wings; the sheep and the colts run to and fro in the grass, while the mistis sleep or watch, calculating the weight of their steers. In the evening Tayta Inti gilds the sk, gilds the earth, but they sneeze, spur their horses on the road, or drink coffee, drink hot pisco.
But in the hearts of the Puquios, the valley is weeping and laughing, in their eyes the sky and the sun are alive; within them the valley sings with the voice of the morning, of the noontide, of the afternoon, of the evening. — Jose Maria Arguedas

If you allow a creek to go back to being a creek, if you let the trees and the bramble get overgrown, and you let the stream overrun its banks whenever it wants to, the wetland will take care of itself. The water that trickles into the ocean will be clean and pristine if everything is just left alone to work the way it was designed to work. Earthworms have shown that they can take care of the soil in the same way that a wetland takes care of the water. Nature regenerates. It Cleans. It hides a multitude of sins. — Amy Stewart

We cannot see the universe. We are in the darkness of a trench, a deep cut, dark water heavier than earth, presences lit by our own blood, little biolumes, heroic and pathetic Promethei too afraid or weak to steal fire but able still to love. Gods are among us and they care nothing and are nothing like us.
This is how we are brave: we worship them anyway. — China Mieville

Fire, air, earth, and water are bodies and therefore solids, and solids are contained in planes, and plane rectilinear figures are made up of triangles. — Plato

Allah was when there was nothing else than Him, and His Throne was upon the water, and He wrote in the Reminder (al-dhikr) all things, and He created the heavens and the earth. — Ibn Ata Allah

Restrooms at gas stations were an unpleasant and shocking surprise; I had never considered the serious drawbacks of such lazily-cleaned rooms. I was completely unable to ignore the filth, and wasted a burst of power to turn the sink, floors and porcelain toilet into sparkling, clean examples of their kind before using the facility. I felt that was a much less judgmental response than simply blowing the place off the face of the Earth, which was also a distinct temptation, especially when the storekeeper overcharged me for a bottle of cold water. — Rachel Caine

On the sea he wished to meet it, if meet it he must. He was not sure why this was, yet he had a terror of meeting the thing again on dry land. Out of the sea there rise storms and monsters, but no evil powers: evil is of earth. And there is no sea, no running of river or spring, in the dark land where once Ged had gone. Death is the dry place. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The elements of trial and error, similar to earth and sky, and fire and water, delineates the constituent modules of our lives. Living robustly includes more failures than successes. We achieve adeptness to living by exhibiting a willingness to make good faith mistakes and learn from each misadventure. Every effort that fails to achieve our expected result is understandably frustrating. The fact is that without ideas and dreams and devoid of occasional crash landings, a person can never hope to achieve any worthy acts to temper resounding personal disappointment. Meaningful success is ultimately defined when a person dies, when an entire life's work devoted to performing passionate and compassionate enterprises can be judge as a whole unit. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Clean air and water, a diversity of animal and plant species, soil and mineral resources, and predictable weather are annuities that will pay dividends for as long as the human race survives - and may even extend our stay on Earth. — Alex Steffen

And if the world has forgotten you,
say this to the stable earth: I run.
Tell the rushing water: I exist. — Rainer Maria Rilke

We are all the products of nature composed with essential elements. Every natural force has an opposite. The components of earth, wind, water, and fire comprise nature. Similar to nature, we contain complementary, contradictory, and counterpoising elements. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Up again to the crest, and still no sight of land. Something that looked like clouds - or could it be ships? - far away on his left. Then, down, down, down - he thought he would never reach the end of it . . . this time he noticed how dim the light was. Such tepid revelry in water - such glorious bathing, as one would have called it on earth, suggested as its natural accompaniment a blazing sun. But here there was no such thing. The water gleamed, the sky burned with gold, but all was rich and dim, and his eyes fed upon it undazzled and unaching. The very names of green and gold, which he used perforce in describing the scene, are too harsh for the tenderness, the muted iridescence, of that warm, maternal, delicately gorgeous world. It was mild to look upon as evening, warm like summer noon, gentle and winning like early dawn. It was altogether pleasurable. He sighed. — C.S. Lewis

One of the most magical places on Earth is a small island in the Caribbean called Mustique. With brilliant beaches, warm water, and lush vegetation, this tiny green swath of land is my idea of paradise. — Nina Garcia

And now I know that you're the one
I've waited my whole life for
You're budding leaves turning green in spring
You're the fresh breath of air that summer brings
You're the autumn sky painted in rainbow hues
You're the wintry ocean dancing in shimmering blues
You're the air I breahte
You're the water I drink
You're the fire inside me
The earth under my feet
You're the one — Kendall Grey

Earth and air, fire and water, the stars in their courses, the high tide of destiny and the Will of divine Providence are all arrayed against the forces of oppression. -- Louis Gregory — Janet Ruhe-Schoen

In point of fact, he was not afraid to die, not anymore. He now understood with a faith that he had never before possessed that he would see those he had lost when he died, that everything would be made whole, that he would talk to Boukman, and his mother and father and sister, again. It was true that there was no need on earth that could not be slaked and satisfied. When you are thirsty there is water. When you are hungry there is food. It is impossible to need a thing without that thing being available for the having. A man may want a green horse that flies, but he canot need one, for there is no such thing.
At this precise moment, Toussaint felt that he needed Boukman, that he could not bear it if he never saw him again, and he knew, because this need existed, that it would be met. — Nick Lake

Be like the sun for grace and mercy. Be like the night to cover others' faults. Be like running water for generosity. Be like death for rage and anger. Be like the Earth for modesty. Appear as you are. Be as you appear. — Rumi

There's only three major elements. Air, land, which is your flesh and water, which is your blood. You're walking on a third of yourself. She's called Mother Earth. She gave birth to your ass. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, your maggot food ass going right back to her! — Eddie Griffin

And now that they have us here, under their control, they've dropped whatever act they had on earth. We're seeing them as they really are.' He dipped his glove into the water and watched as the water turned golden. The air suddenly smelled of citrus. 'Look! It's orange juice!'
'Josh, focus!'
'You sound just like Mom or Isis or whatever her name is. — Michael Scott

By the word of God ... the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: but the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men. 2 Peter 3:5-7. Another storm is coming. The earth will again be swept by the desolating wrath of God, and sin and sinners will be destroyed. — Ellen G. White

The Atlantic is a stormy moat, and the Mediterranean,
The blue pool in the old garden,
More than five thousand years has drunk sacrifice
Of ships and blood and shines in the sun; but here the Pacific:
The ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant.
Neither our present blood-feud with the brave dwarfs
Nor any future world-quarrel of westering
And eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, battle-falcons,
Are a mote of dust in the great scale-pan.
Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland plunging like
dolphins through the grey sea-smoke
Into pale sea, look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet: this
dome, this half-globe, this bulging
Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,
Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids that never close; this
is the staring unsleeping
Eye of the earth, and what it watches is not our wars. — Robinson Jeffers