Quotes & Sayings About Muddy Water

It was June in Maharashtra, and the monsoon would not come. The whole district lay panting in the heat, the burning sky clapped tight overhead like the lid of a tandoor oven. Lean goats stumbled down the narrow alleyways, udders hanging slack and dry beneath them; beggars cried for water in every village. Dust-devils swept over baked clay and through the dry weeds, whistling and shrieking. Hot sand blew into the eyes of torpid bullocks as they leaned into the yoke, whips snapping over their bony backs. A single stream crept along the valley floor, shrunken and muddy, and women stood ankle deep in its shallows, beating their laundry against rocks that rippled and danced in the sun. — Arinn Dembo

Awakening into the God state makes all the perceptual limitations of the mind disappear, just like a bucket of muddy water turns crystal-clear once poured into the ocean. — Abhijit Naskar

Obscure as muddied water. But, with stillness, muddy waters clear. Can you also act while remaining still? — Lao-Tzu

The people's awe and innate fear will hold injustice back by day, by night, so long as the people leave the laws intact, just as they are: muddy the cleanest spring, and all you'll have to drink is muddy water. — Aeschylus

Water is a commodity not by any means to be found everywhere ... When found, it is more than likely to be bad, being either from a bitter alkaline pool, or from a hole in a creek, so muddy that it can only be called liquid by courtesy. — Theodore Roosevelt

May we exist like a lotus, / At home in the muddy water. / Thus we bow to life as it is. — Zen

They all seemed hungry, happy, and healthy enough in their buzzing - oh the days were hot, and the noise of bees filled the air that was dusty with pollen and sun haze, and there were tiny black flies stuck to one another crowded by the creek and a creek stink rising from the deep pool under the willow tree where a wheat sack of new kittens had been drowned, and their tiny terrible struggling had shot like an electric current through the confusion of muddy water and up the arm of the person who had tied the stone around the mouth of the sack and thrust it into the water; and the culprit had not been able to brush away the current; it penetrated her body and made her heart beat with fear and pity. I was the culprit. — Janet Frame

Songs choose their hour and their own season. When your tune's tin, there is a reason. The tone of a tune is your heart's mettle, and there's no clear water from a muddy well. All you can do is let the silt settle, or you'll sound sour as a broken bell. — Patrick Rothfuss

As muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone, it could be argued that those who sit quietly and do nothing are making one of the best possible contributions to a world in turmoil. — Alan Watts

Let's work and rest happily, abandon us to the course of life; let's run out the muddy and rotten water of the daily thinking and within the Void will flow the Gnosis and with it, the Joy for living. — Samael Aun Weor

Once you have a thick mixture, stop and use the cloth to strain the muddy water. It is this muddy water which contains the hair growing magic. This water should then be mixed with shampoo and applied to your head to help your hair grow. — Roc Marten

I'm a massive hater of 3D. I don't like it at all. For me, you go to a movie theatre and you want to be taken to a place and transported to a place and be in that environment, and I know 3D is meant to do that, but the effect for me is the reverse. I feel like I'm looking though muddy water, and I can't really see the image. — Neill Blomkamp

The more I think of it, the more our ideas, our idols and our so-called holy practices, and those of our visions which supposedly are ineffable, all seem to me to be engendered merely by the stirrings of the human machine, exactly as is the wind from our nostrils or from our netherparts, and as is our sweat and salty water from tears, or the white blood passed in love, or the muddy excrement of the body. It enraged me to think that man should so waste his own substance in construction of theories that were almost always pernicious, and should speak of chastity before having examined the whole machinery of sex; that he should debate the question of free will instead of pondering the thousand obscure reasons which, for example, cause you to blink if I suddenly point a stick at your eyes; or that he should talk of Hell before having looked more closely into the question of death. — Marguerite Yourcenar

The buckets emptied quickly, and men from different squads took turns bringing water from the gully that lay towards the city, where, in the feeble shade of emaciated mulberries, a muddy stream lived out its last days in the diabolical heat. — Mikhail Bulgakov

You have the habit of walking slowly holding grudges and resentments. Ill-tempered and greedy, small-minded, and with so many attachments how do you expect to attain union? Leave this muddy water and seek clarity. Being so weak, you need all the help and the grace of God to overcome the waves and reach the shore to safety. Take shelter with those who need no shelter. Only on the horse of love can you go beyond the sun and moon to behold the Perfect One. — Rumi

Let's not muddy the brook ; Perhaps a pigeon is drinking water at a distance, Or a pitcher is being filled in a village, Or a dervish may be dipping dry bread in the brook.
The folk upstream understand the water.
They did not muddy the brook. We also must not muddy the brook... — Sohrab Sepehri

I saw an interview with Keith Richards. He said, 'How else could a kid in Dartford suddenly connect with and understand what Muddy Waters is singing?' There's a cultural difference, but there's just something in that music that subconsciously or internally you just understand; it just makes sense. — Paul Weller

Men may sail the seas for a lifetime and seldom, if ever, come in contact with the nightmare monsters that inhabit the caves and cliffs of the ocean floor. Gazing down at the slightly muddy water, the men of The Unicorn saw a squirming mass of interwoven tentacles resembling enormous snakes, immensely thick and long and tapering at their free ends to the size of a man's thumb. It was a foul sight, an obscene growth from the dark places of the world, where incessant hunger is the driving force. At one place, down near the bulge of the hull, appeared a staring gorgon face with great lidless eyes and a huge parrot beak that moved slightly, opening and shutting as though it had just crunched and swallowed a meal of warm flesh.
("Fire In The Galley Stove") — William Outerson

If I sang the way I talk it would sound like "Tommy Steele sings Muddy Waters!" — James Hunter

I've always wanted the sound of Muddy Waters' early records - only louder — Eric Clapton

Don't think they have them in New York City." She laughed. I didn't mind. "We get lobsters, though. They can hurt you." "Can you keep one? I mean, you can't keep a lobster like a pet or anything, right?" She laughed again. "No. You eat them." "You can't keep a crayfish either. They die. One day or maybe two, tops. I hear people eat them too, though." "Really?" "Yeah. Some do. In Louisiana or Florida or someplace." We looked down into the can. "I don't know," she said, smiling. "There's not a whole lot to eat down there." "Let's get some big ones." We lay across the Rock side by side. I took the can and slipped both arms down into the brook. The trick was to turn the stones one at a time, slowly so as not to muddy the water, then have the can there — Jack Ketchum

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone. — Alan W. Watts

They muddy the water, to make it seem deep. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Who is there who can make muddy waters clear? But if allowed to remain still, it will gradually clear itself. — Laozi

There are times in relationships, when we blow it. In spite of our best intentions, we wrong others. Our jealousy makes us feel inferior. Our own wounds cause us to act irrationally. Our insecurities lead us to say hurtful things.
And so, we find ourselves acting out. In short, we cloud our lives with muddy water. We trash around the pond of our emotions until things are just too messed up to figure out how to fix them.
It is in the times of muddy water that we learn how to wait it out. We have to wait until the mud settles. We must wait until we can clearly see where the water of our lives ends and the mud of misplaced emotions begin.
Have the patience to wait until the mud settles. Be still until the water is clear. In clear water, words come. Right actions reveal them selves and healing appears.
From the Devotional A Word in Season — Stella Payton

And he relished a day at Lake George in the Adirondacks on his trip through the north with James Madison in 1791.26,27,28 "An abundance of speckled trout, salmon trout, bass and other fish with which it is stored, have added to our other amusements the sport of taking them," Jefferson had written Patsy. He had been as unhappy with Lake Champlain as he had been happy with Lake George, noting that the larger Champlain was "a far less pleasant water.29 It is muddy, turbulent, and yields little game" - all things Jefferson disliked in fishing as in life. — Jon Meacham

What Muddy Waters did for us is what we should do for others. It's the old thing, what you want written on your tombstone as a musician; HE PASSED IT ON. — Keith Richards

All the really great records or people who made them somehow came from Memphis or Louisiana or somewhere along the Mississippi River ... And singers like Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters gave me the feeling that they were right there, standing by the river. — John Fogerty

Reelfoot is, and has always been, a lake of mystery.
In places it is bottomless. Other places the skeletons of the cypress-trees that went down when the earth sank, still stand upright so that if the sun shines from the right quarter, and the water is less muddy than common, a man, peering face downward into its depths, sees, or thinks he sees, down below him the bare top-limbs upstretching like drowned men's fingers, all coated with the mud of years and bandaged with pennons of the green lake slime. — Irvin S. Cobb

The move away from writing poetry was gradual. It was a gentle slope into a muddy pond; it was a collection of choices. There was no one thing that took the pen from my hand. Life got in the way. Poetry was an elective. I elected to let it slip into the water. I elected to let my inner poet slide into that deep water and float there a long time, until at last I could no longer see her there drowning."
-Nearly Orthodox — Angela Doll Carlson

The Black-Eye-of-the-Month Club I was born with water on the brain. Okay, so that's not exactly true. I was actually born with too much cerebral spinal fluid inside my skull. But cerebral spinal fluid is just the doctors' fancy way of saying brain grease. And brain grease works inside the lobes like car grease works inside an engine. It keeps things running smooth and fast. But weirdo me, I was born with too much grease inside my skull, and it got all thick and muddy and disgusting, and it only mucked up the works. My thinking and breathing and living engine slowed down and flooded. My brain was drowning in grease. But — Sherman Alexie

There is something about nature out of control that touches a primal terror. We are used to believing that we're the masters of our domain, and that God has given us this earth to rule over. We need this illusion like a good night-light. The truth is more fearsome: we are as frail as young trees in tornadoes, and our beloved homes are one flood away from driftwood. We plant our roots in trembling earth, we live where mountains rose and fell and prehistoric seas burned away in mist. We and the towns we have built are not permanent; the earth itself is a passing train. When you stand in muddy water that is rising toward your waist and you hear people shouting against the darkness and see their figures struggling to hold back the currents that will not be denied, you realize the truth of it: we will not win, but we cannot give up. — Robert McCammon

The best musicians in the world were raised on the same kind of music I was raised on and that is black, soulful, authoritative, ultra-tight, ferocious, uppity, defiant music that from the Howlin' Wolf, the Muddy Waters, the Lightnin' Hopkins, the Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and Little Richard. — Ted Nugent

During zazen, brain and consciousness become pure. It's exactly like muddy water left to stand in a glass. Little by little, the sediment sinks to the bottom and the water becomes pure. — Taisen Deshimaru

You can't see the water until you run into it. A little boy took off running through it. He got all muddy. — Shannon O'Brien

Boredom was at the root of Lazare's unhappiness, an oppressive, unremitting boredom, exuding from everything like the muddy water of a poisoned spring. He was bored with leisure, with work, with himself even more than with others. Meanwhile he blamed his own idleness for it, he ended by being ashamed of it. — Emile Zola

I can't make any promises ... I became a scientist because ... it's ike panning for gold in a muddy torrent. Truth is the gold. I- I don't know what I want to do ... '
'Journalists work in torrents just as muddy.'
The moon is over the water.
'Do ... whatever you can't not do. — David Mitchell

The steel-framed span loomed thirty feet above the muddy water. At the far end of the hundred-foot deck, the forest swallowed up a dirt road that used to lead somewhere. Years of traffic rumbling across the bridge had worn parallel streaks into the deck, and heavy runner boards covered holes in rotted planks. Metal rails sagged in spots. Still, the reddish-brown truss beams on either side stood stiff and straight, and overhead braces cast shadows on the deck below. On that rusty frame, between lines of vertical rivets, someone had painted a skull and crossbones and scribbled: 'Danger, This Is You. — Jason Morgan Ward

Muddy water, let stand, becomes clear. — Lao-Tzu

May we live like the lotus, at home in muddy water. — Gautama Buddha

The only thing that ever leaves this place is that muddy water in the Rappahannock. — Randolph Randy Camp

I can't remember if it was in the third grade in school, I was being told that two amoeba happened to hit in a muddy puddle of water two billion years ago, and I was an accident. I was the result. I wasn't real smart, but I said, 'I don't like the sound of that.' — Joe Gibbs

as Emma, stood and gathered plates. "And thin as a rail, you are. Looks like I need to fatten you up." She cackled again. Dakota moved to help her clean the small kitchen, really just a small corner of the entire living space, but Emma waved her off. "No, you been sick. Just sit there and talk to us." "How sick was I?" "With that fever of yers, I's afraid you just might not make it." Hank hurried the words, then looked at her from the bottom of his bifocals, bearded chin in air. "Didn't your grandparents teach you not to roll around in muddy water when it's freezing outside?" Dakota shrunk a little lower. They knew — Cathy Bryant

If water stands motionless in a pool it grows stale and muddy, but when it moves and flows it becomes clear: so, too, man in his wanderings. — Muhammad Asad

Hardly a day goes by without me sticking on a Muddy Waters record. — Rory Gallagher

BEHOLD: IN THE BEGINNING there was everything, just as there is now. The giant slap of a thunderclap and, bang, it's raining talking snakes. A greater light to rule the day, a lesser light to rule the night, swarming water and restless air. A man goes down on two knees, a woman opens her thighs, and both hold their breath to listen. Imagining God's footsteps could be heard in the cool of the day. But God walks silently along the bank of the muddy river that flows out of the Garden, the river that divides and becomes many: Usa, Kolva, Yug, Onega. Narva, Obsha, Luga, Okhta. Volycha, Sestra, Uver, Oyat. Volga, Kama, Neva, Ob. — Anonymous

Muddy water will become clear if allowed to stand undisturbed, and so too will the mind become clear if it is allowed to be still. — Ming-Dao Deng

Who can (make) the muddy water (clear)? — Lao-Tzu

Display is like shallow water, where you can see the muddy bottom. — Alphonse Karr

People look like rivers very much: water is everywhere the same, but the rivers are narrow, fast, wide, pure, cold, muddy and warm. The people are the same. They have the rudiment of every human habit in them and they behave according to them. Sometimes they even do not look like themselves, but they still stay whatever they are. — Leo Tolstoy

It's one thing to play a Muddy Waters song. It's another thing to play with him. — Keith Richards

They just said, 'Roll the tape.' No rehearsal or nothing ... Muddy [Waters] didn't come in and say 'I wanna rehearse.' He used to look at me and say 'Let's just play the blues. That's all you need to do. — Buddy Guy

And in a small house five miles away was a man who held my mud-encrusted charm bracelet out to his wife.
Look what I found at the old industrial park," he said. "A construction guy said they were bulldozing the whole lot. They're afraid of sink holes like that one that swallowed the cars."
His wife poured him some water from the sink as he fingered the tiny bike and the ballet shoe, the flower basket and the thimble. He held out the muddy bracelet as she set down his glass.
This little girl's grown up by now," she said.
Almost. Not quite.
I wish you all a long and happy life. — Alice Sebold

The confrontation lasted about five minutes; then the display died out as quickly as it had begun, and everyone drank his fill of the muddy water. Honor had been satisfied; each group had staked its claim to its own territory. — Arthur C. Clarke

I went camping one time when I was twelve, to the Great Lakes. My friend stepped in really deep muddy water and started screaming and sinking. My mom ran up, and I was just standing there a foot away and wouldn't stick out my hand to pull him up. So I'm probably not the best person to take on a camping trip. — Norman Reedus

I'd like to get something together - like a Handel, Bach, Muddy waters, flamenco type of thing. If I could get that sound, I'd be happy — Jimi Hendrix

Let muddy water stand and it will become clear. — Laozi

Isn't my music the last of the real rhythm and blues? Isn't it great? It's because of my musicians, we were weaned on Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, all the founding fathers, the gods of thunder, who invented the foundation and the pulse of the greatest music in the world! — Ted Nugent

Those original, black, spirited, defiant, rebellious musical masters. Chuck Berry was one of the first masters of Les Paul's new electric guitar; he pretty much laid down the gauntlet, and I don't think anybody's ever beat him since. Way before the British Invasion, I was tuned into the black guys that created the British Invasion. Without Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Lightnin' Hopkins, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry and the Motown hits, there would be no Beatles. — Ted Nugent

Trying to understand is like straining through muddy water. Have the patience to wait! Be still and allow the mud to settle. — Lao-Tzu

There's no clear water from a muddy well. All you can do is let the silt settle until the water clears otherwise it will taste sour. (paraphrased) — Patrick Rothfuss

N-no-o, all that excitement, it wouldn't reach us,' Timosha spoke gloomily. 'We're like the sunken city of Kitezh, living at the bottom of the lake. We do not hear a thing, and the water over us is muddy and sleepy. And on the surface, way above - why, everything's in flames, and the alarms are ringing.' ("A Provincial Tale") — Yevgeny Zamyatin

My own musical background is based in the blues, and in classical composition. I grew up listening to Muddy Waters, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Beethoven and Bach. — Frederick Lenz

For groups like the Rolling Stones names like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf were exotic inspirations. For Siegel-Schwall they were the guys that played with them on 43rd Street. — Lin Brehmer

Everywhere she looked, she saw bright colors: on the drab, gray concrete apartments, on the tin-roofed, open-fronted stores, in the muddy water flowing in the gutters. It was as though a rainbow had melted into her eyes. Rasheed — Khaled Hosseini

Ah can look through muddy water and see dry land. — Zora Neale Hurston

Coffee as drunk in England, debilitates the stomach, and produces a slight nausea ... it is usually made from bad Coffee, served out tepid and muddy, and drowned in a deluge of water. — William Kitchiner

To solicit the aid of luck is like stirring muddy water to bring objects submerged at the bottom to the top where they can be seen. Every worker would to well to tempt their good luck. Nevertheless, we should not depend on it too much. — Santiago Ramon Y Cajal

Wet sneakers and muddy clothes are prerequisites for understanding the water cycle. — David Sobel

No good water comes from a muddy spring. No sweet fruit comes from a bitter seed. — Jose Rizal

Upstream, Arkansas and Ohio have their bottomlands, too, populated by a jaundiced and hungry-looking race, prone to fevers, whose eyes gleam at the sight of stone and iron, for they know only sand and driftwood and muddy water. — Jorge Luis Borges

It is useless to try to stir the dirt Out of the muddy water, As it will become murkier. But leave it alone, And if it should be cleared; It will become clear by itself. — Bruce Lee

The seed of mystery lies in muddy water. How can I perceive this mystery? Water becomes clear through stillness. How can I become still? By flowing with the stream. — Laozi

He has attempted to muddy the waters, but I think anyone that watched the battle that we had - you know, there was a time for choosing, as [Ronald] Reagan put it, where there was a battle over amnesty. And some chose, like Sen.[Marco] Rubio, to stand with Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer and support a massive amnesty plan. — Ted Cruz

The lotus grows in muddy waters but this flower does not show any trace of it: So we have to live in the world. — B.K.S. Iyengar

Battered by shifing currents and a cold, unrelenting wind, we sailed past deserted islands crowded with pines and a ghost tree growing staight out of the water, its gaunt trunk and scrawny branches raised heavenward like an outcast pleading for his life. Now, having reached the north shore, we were doggedly searching for the hidden rivulet that would take us into The Peak. We were trapped in muddy water barbed with grasses and covered with thick green algae, which broke apart in clumps, then, after we'd edged through, resealed, erasing all signs of our passing.

The wind had dissipated - strange, as it'd been so turbulent minutes ago out on the lake. Dense trees surrounded us, packed like hordes of stranded prisoners. There wasn't a single bird, not a scuttle through the branches, not a cry - as if everything alive had fled. — Marisha Pessl

Today's dirty hands are tomorrow's muddy water — Danielle Hylton-Outland

She held him at arms' length, looked at the pipe still gripped inn his hand, then looked at his face and read him like a book. She ran the tip of her red tongue slowly across her full cushiony, sensuous lips, making them wet-red and looked him straight in the eyes with her own glassy, speckled bedroom eyes.

The man drowned.

When he came up, he stared back, passion cocked, his whole black being on a live-wire edge. Ready! Solid ready to cut throats, crack skulls, dodge police, steal hearses, drink muddy water, live in a hollow log, and take any rape-fiend chance to be once more in the arms of his high-yellow heart. — Chester Himes

I opened my louvres and looked at Comfort, walking in the heavy rain, crying bitterly.
I heard mom saying, Anywhere you want to go, you can, but don't come back again to this house.
Comfort was beautiful, but her stealing attributes brought reproach on her and painted her beauty with dark impressions.
I looked at her, walking barefooted on the muddy ground congested with rain water. — Michael Bassey Johnson

In vain people busy themselves with finding any good of man's own in his will. For any mixture of the power of freewill that men strive to mingle with God's grace is nothing but a corruption of grace. It is just as if one were to dilute wine with muddy, bitter water. — John Calvin

While I thus cogitate in disquiet and perplexity, half submerged in dark waters of a well in an Arabian oasis, I suddenly hear a voice from the background of my memory, the voice of an old Kurdish nomad: If water stands motionless in a pool it grows stale and muddy, but when it moves and flows it becomes clear: so, too, man in his wanderings. Whereupon, as if by magic, all disquiet leaves me. I begin to look upon myself with distant eyes, as you might look at the pages of a book to read a story from them; and I begin to understand that my life could not have taken a different course. For when I ask myself, 'What is the sum total of my life?' somthing in me seems to answer, 'You have set out to exchange one world for another-to gain a new world for yourself in exchange for an old one which you never really possessed.' And I know with startling clarity that such an undertaking might indeed take an entire lifetime. — Muhammad Asad

One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be qualified in some particular way
said to be kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic, and so on. People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic or vice versa; but it could never be true to say of one man that he is kind or wise, and of another that he is wicked or stupid. Yet we are always classifying mankind in this way. And it is wrong. Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man. — Leo Tolstoy

The hunter for aphorisms on human nature has to fish in muddy water, and he is even condemned to find much of his own mind. — F.H. Bradley

Her father had once told her that water has a memory; that every rock, every stone, every grain of muddy sediment leaves something of a fingerprint in the water that flows over it. Grace liked this idea, imagining the water of the great lakes and oceans of the world to echo with the memories of the places, people, and events it had passed on its journey. — Hazel Gaynor

Obscure, like muddy waters. — Laozi

Truth is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. — John Milton