Quotes & Sayings About Going Upstream

He whose longing has been aroused for the indescribable, whose mind has been quickened by it, and whose thought is not attached to sensuality is truly called one who is bound upstream. — Gautama Buddha

Our calling is not only to pull people out of the river, but to go upstream to find out what or who is pushing them in. — Jim Wallis

While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand new, even more unsustainable entitlement at the health care 'summit,' thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen - because they're part of the same story. It's just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They're at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is further upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided, instead, that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe. — Mark Steyn

If life is a river, then pursuing Christ requires swimming upstream. When we stop swimming, or actively following Him, we automatically begin to be swept downstream. — Francis Chan

Great Brown Bear is walking with us, Salmon swimming upstream with us, as we stroll a city street. — Gary Snyder

Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you. — Wendell Berry

It wasn't the lower classes that preached the religion of sexual liberation. That came from the upper classes, with their comfortable cushions against the resulting disorder. What did it matter to them that they were polluting the waters? Their houses were upstream. The biological absurdism of same-sex pseudogamy (mock-marriage) is just the latest effort of the same irresponsible destroyers. Let those who are in favor of the world that the sexual revolution has produced defend it on its "merits," and not decree all discussion out of bounds from the beginning. We are not talking about privacy here, but about the air we all must breathe and the water we all must drink. — Anthony M. Esolen

To Hegel, history was like a running river. Every tiny movement in the water at a given spot in the river is determined by the falls and eddies in the water higher upstream. But these movements are determined, too, by the rocks and bends in the river at the point where you are observing it.
the history of thought
or of reason
is like this river. The thoughts that are washed along with the current of past tradition, as well as the material conditions prevailing at the time, help to determine how you think. You can therefore never claim that any particular thought is correct for ever and ever. But the thought can be correct from where you stand — Jostein Gaarder

Investing in women is smart economics, and investing in girls, catching them upstream, is even smarter economics. — Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

In college, a group of guys labelled me a "righteous little beaver." Again, I was slightly pissed because it seemed offensive and misdirected, but when I learned that beavers swim upstream, I realized that maybe it was fitting after all. — Amy Richards

Trying to control the emotional self willfully 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

We should follow every supply that runs into the particular lake below, going upstream in terms of we can. When we do not find Drakes' path, or even an additional, we should come back straight along,look yourself upward an additional way to obtain foods,and then do a similar for the next water for the south. — Chayada Welljaipet

Being an actor, you always feel like you're swimming upstream. People are going, "No, they don't like you. They don't like the way you look. They don't like how old you are." — Bradley Whitford

Fear represents our need to hang on to the riverbank, to control outcomes, results, our lives; it swims upstream. Truth is about releasing that hold, letting go of results, and trusting the direction of Life's current. — Tom Shadyac

( ... ) the train goes fast and is going fast when it crosses a little trestle. You catch the sober, metallic, pure, late-light, unriffled glint of the water between the little banks, under the sky, and see the cow standing in the water upstream near the single leaning willow. And all at once you feel like crying. But the train is going fast, and almost immediately whatever you feel is taken away from you, too. — Robert Penn Warren

You never stand beside the same river twice; you have to keep looking upstream. — Donald Keough

I found my mind wandering at games; loved boxing and was good at it; and in summer, having chosen rowing instead of cricket, lay peacefully by the Stour, well upstream of the rhythmic creaking and the exhortation, reading Lily Christine and Gibbon and gossiping with kindred lotus-eaters under the willow-branches. — Patrick Leigh Fermor

I know that life is busy and hard and that there's crushing pressure to just settle down and get a real job and khaki pants and a haircut. But don't. Please don't. Please keep believing that life can be better, brighter, broader because of the art that you make. Please keep demonstrating the courage that it takes to swim upstream in a world that prefers putting away for retirement to putting pen to paper, that chooses practicality over poetry, that values you more for going to the gym than going to the deepest places in your soul. Please keep making your art for people like me, people who need the magic and imagination and honesty of great art to make the day-to-day world a little more bearable. — Shauna Niequist

One can never swim upstream to a prosper future if they continue to drown in their past. — Timothy Pina

My life is what a salmon must feel like. They are always going upstream, against the current. — Laura Schlessinger

If the bonus army conquered Washington the lawyer had a boat hidden in the Sacramento River, and he was going to row upstream for a few months and then come back because they always needed lawyers after a revolution to straighten out all the legal side. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I can honestly say, there was a moment when I was writing 'Upstream Color' where I fell so hard for what it was becoming that I couldn't think of anything else. I was absolutely secure in this story in the way I'm rarely secure about anything else in my life. — Shane Carruth

You're trying to swim upstream against the current. What is there about the natural flow of the river of life that has shocked you so strongly that you should want to swim against the current, even against time? You ought to know you're lost even before you begin. I don't understand you but I love you and I suppose you are obeying the law of your being. — Francoise Gilot

The Buddha described his teaching as "going against the stream." The unflinching light of mindful awareness reveals the extent to which we are tossed along in the stream of past conditioning and habit. The moment we decide to stop and look at what is going on (like a swimmer suddenly changing course to swim upstream instead of downstream), we find ourselves battered by powerful currents we had never even suspected - precisely because until that moment we were largely living at their command. — Stephen Batchelor

I fished upstream coming ever closer and closer to the narrow staircase of the canyon. Then I went up into it as if I were entering a department store. I caught three trout in the lost and found department. — Richard Brautigan

When you come from your heart in the midst of your self and in your life, you'll be like a salmon turning and going upstream. You'll be going against the stream. You'll be going against what your self is like. In that way, you are training your self, your conditioning and the streams of your self. — John De Ruiter

Salmon. Salmon, salmon, salmon, salmon. I eat so much salmon at these weddings, twice a year I get this urge to swim upstream. — David Nicholls

We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization ... In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system ... It is the greatest possible victory to be, to continue to be, and to have been. No defeat can deprive us of the success of having existed for some moment of time in a universe that seems indifferent to us.
This is no defeatism ... The declaration of our own nature and the attempt to build up an enclave of organization in the face of nature's overwhelming tendency to disorder is an insolence against the gods and the iron necessity that they impose. Here lies tragedy, but here lies glory too ...
All this represents the manner in which I believe I have been able to add something positive to the pessimism of ... the existensialists. I have not replaced the gloom of existence by a philosophy which is optimistic in any Pollyanna sense, but ... with a positive attitude toward the universe and toward our life in it. — Norbert Wiener

A pathetic shadow, torn between her envy and thrill of being seen with Masomma, sharing in the attention as a weed would, lapping up water meant for the lily upstream. — Khaled Hosseini

The spiraling flights of moths appear haphazard only because of the mechanisms of olfactory tracking are so different from our own. Using binocular vision, we judge the location of an object by comparing the images from two eyes and tracking directly toward the stimulus. But for species relying on the sense of smell, the organism compares points in space, moves in the direction of the greater concentration, then compares two more points successively, moving in zigzags toward the source. Using olfactory navigation the moth detects currents of scent in the air and, by small increments, discovers how to move upstream. — Barbara Kingsolver

While I was swimming in the pool the other day, I was thinking about all kinds of things. About you, about Helsinki. I'm not sure how to put it, maybe like swimming upstream, back to my gut feelings." "While you were swimming?" "I can think well when I'm swimming." Sara paused for a time, as if impressed. "Like a salmon." "I don't know much about salmon." "Salmon travel a long way. Driven by something," Sara said. "Did you ever see Star Wars?" "When I was a kid." "May the force be with you," she said. "So you don't lose out to the salmon. — Haruki Murakami

After a lifetime of swimming upstream, I am convinced that one of the real secrets to Wal-mart's phenomenal success has been that very tendency. — Sam Walton

Always drink upstream from the herd. — Will Rogers

Marketers have to move upstream now. We have to stop being the last step in the process and start being the first step. — Seth Godin

This green place in which I stood with James turned slowly around us like a music box. All my memories returning, and all his. I could see and feel each of his days and he mine. Childhood songs, books read, hearts broken, arguments forgiven.The sweetness of these imperfections far outshining the regrets. Our lives overlapped as naturally as two blades of grass brushing together.
My pain forgotten, my clothes dry and clean, I pulled James close to me. As he lifted my chin, I felt no sensation of falling as when I had been Light touching one who is Quick. It wasn't the mere heat of a stolen moment in borrowed flesh. We touched now soul to soul, both of us Light. And when we kissed, the garden rocked, floating upstream. — Laura Whitcomb

Obama does not believe in individual upward mobility. He would penalize it, tax it, regulate it, inveigh against it and disincentivize it. We will be like salmon swimming upstream to mate. We will overcome the currents, the waterfall, the rocks and the predators, and will grapple our way up the stream. Then, at the top of the waterfall will stand Obama the Bear, waiting to scoop us up and have us for dinner. The taxman cometh. — Dick Morris

Independent will is our capacity to act. It gives us the power to transcend our paradigms, to swim upstream, to rewrite our scripts, to act based on principle rather than reacting based on emotion or circumstance. — Stephen R. Covey

When we really keep in the forefront of our thoughts that our intention in this life is to recover and be free, then being of service, practicing meditation, and doing what we need to do to get free becomes the only rational decision. This takes discipline, effort, and a deep commitment. It takes a form of rebellion, both inwardly and outwardly, because we not only subvert our own conditioning, we also walk a path that is totally countercultural. The status quo in our world is to be attached to pleasure and to avoid all unpleasant experiences. Our path leads upstream, against the normal human confusions and sufferings. — Noah Levine

{W}hy did she go into the field? A twinge of pleasure, of knowledge. Her dad would pull over to the side of a bridge, and they would watch from above, before he slipped down the bank to catch them. She was charmed by the motions of trout. How they take their forms from the pressures of another world, the cold forge of water. Their drift, their mystery, the way they turn and let the current take them, take them, with passive grace. They turn again, tumbling like leaves, then straighten with mouths pointing upstream, to better sip a mayfly, to root up nymphs, to watch for the flash of a heron's bill. The current always trues them, like compass needles. When she watches them, she feels wise. — Matthew Neill Null

He pointed upstream and led us through the foggy morning, with spotty snow flurries and a forty percent chance of death. — Rick Riordan

Look upstream. Just simply turn around; have you no will? — Annie Dillard

When I'm writing my own stuff, it's like swimming upstream. Or ... falling down a cliff and grabbing at branches, trying to invent the branches as I fall. — Rainbow Rowell

I think we're going to the moon because it's in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It's by the nature of his deep inner soul ... we're required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream. — Neil Armstrong

Who is it? Who walks under the trees of the quay? Who is quite lost? Who is past saving? Over whose grave does the grass grow? Dreams have arrived, upstream they came. They came, they climb up the walls of the quay on a ladder. One stops makes conversation with them, they know a number of things, but what they don't know is where they come from. It is quite warm this autumn evening. They turn toward the river and raise their arms. Why do you raise your amrs instead of clasping us in them? — Franz Kafka

Where possible use Value Objects to model concepts in the downstream Context when objects from the upstream Context flow in. By doing so you can integrate with a priority on minimalism, that is, minimizing the number of properties that you assume responsibility for managing in your downstream model. Using immutable Values results in assuming less responsibility. — Anonymous

Time is like a river flowing endlessly through the universe. And if you poled your flatboat in that river you might fight your way against the current and travel upstream into the past. Or go with the flow and rush into the future. This was in a less cynical time before toxic waste dumping and pollution filled the waterway of Chronus with the detritus of empty hours wasted minutes years of repetition and time that has been killed. — Harlan Ellison

I'm swimming upstream. Fighting the tide while the happy dead drift past me to the pools of ignorance. — Katie Waitman

Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. — Sam Walton