Water Element Quotes & Sayings

The Chinese say that water is the most powerful element, because it is perfectly nonresistant. It can wear away a rock, and sweep all before it. — Florence Scovel Shinn

All my life I have felt a great kinship with the madman and the criminal. Practically all my life I have dwelt in big cities; I am unhappy, uneasy, unless I am in a big city. My feeling for Nature is limited to water, mountain and desert. These three form a trine which is more imperative, for me, than any spiritual alimentation. But in the city I am aware of another element which is beyond all these in power of fascination: the labyrinth. To be lost in a strange city is the greatest joy I know; to become oriented is to lose everything. To me the city is crime personified, insanity personified. I feel at home. — Henry Miller

Do you not weep?
Other sins only speak, murder shreaks out:
The element of water moistens the earth,
But blood flies upwards and bedews the heavens. — John Webster

Here I discovered water - a very different element from the green crawling scum that stank in the garden tub. You could pump it in pure blue gulps out of the ground, you could swing on the pump handle and it came out sparkling like liquid sky. And it broke and ran and shone on the tiled floor, or quivered in a jug, or weighted your clothes with cold. You could drink it, draw with it, froth it with soap, swim beetles across it, or fly it in bubbles in the air. You could put your head in it, and open your eyes, and see the sides of the bucket buckle, and hear your caught breath roar, and work your mouth like a fish, and smell the lime from the ground. — Laurie Lee

The liver signifieth the element of water, and it is also the water; for from the liver cometh the blood in the whole body into all the members. The liver is the mother of the blood. — Jakob Bohme

Conscience and covetousness are never to be reconciled; like fire and water they always destroy each other, according to the predominancy of the element. — Jeremy Collier

Once upon a time, [ ... ]. There was a world that was perfectly made and full of birds and striped creatures and lovely things like honey lilies and star tenzing and weasels
[ ... ] And this world already had light and shadow, so it didn't need any rouge stars to come and save it, and it had no use for bleeding suns or weeping moons, either, and most important, it had never known war, which is a terrible and wasteful thing that no world needs. It had earth and water, air and fire, all four elements, but it was missing the last element. Love.
[ ... ]
And so this paradise was like a jewel box without a jewel. There it lay, day after day of rose-colored dawns and creature sounds and strange perfumes, and waited for lovers to find it and fill it with their happiness. The end.
[ ... ]
The story is unfinished. The world is still waiting. — Laini Taylor

Yes! Very funny this terrible thing is. A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns
nicht wahr?
... No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.
So if you ask me
how to be? — Joseph Conrad

The car, is the other connection to the outside world, but to be precise it connects the inhabitants to the inside of the car, not to the outside world per se. The outside world is only an element for moving through, as submarines move through water. — James Howard Kunstler

The hiss of the quenched element, the breakage of the pitcher which I had flung from my hand when I had emptied it, and, above all, the splash of the shower-bath I had liberally bestowed, roused Mr Rochester at last though it was dark, I knew he was awake; because I heard him fulminating strange anathemas at finding himself lying in a pool of water. 'Is there a flood?' he cried — Charlotte Bronte

But I think that I have already been moving too long in a sphere which is not my own. Flying fishes can hold out for a time in the air, but soon they must splash back into the water; allow me, too, to paddle in my own element. — Ivan Turgenev

When I saw them on the beach, perfectly tanned, or when I watched them twirling in the waves, I grasped the transcendental element in surf music. It was all about freedom from the rules of life, the whole of your being concentrated in the act of shooting the tube. For several years after that trip to L.A. I subscribed to Surfer magazine, and I practiced the Atlantic Ocean version of the sport, though only with my body and on rather tame waves. With my voice muffled by the water I would shout a line from "Surf City." To me, this was the ultimate fantasy of plenty: "two girls for every boy," except I sang it as "Two girls for every goy." Fortunately, Brian has survived the schizoid tendencies that seemed close to the surface when I met him. He's still performing and writing songs. But it was his emotional battle and the intersection of that struggle with the acid-dosed aesthetic of the sixties that produced his most astonishing music. — Richard Goldstein

We've been thinking about stage costumes for the 'Satellites' section," Burt said brightly. "I think we should all dress as an element."

Egg frowned. "How do you dress up as water?"

"I've thought about that and it would be a blue leotard and white kilt," Burt replied earnestly. — Jamie Scallion

Even in its darkness, it has this picturesque element. It's something about the human condition. It's not the water itself-it's humanity's relationship to water, because that's almost a human need, that water be a positive force. — Roni Horn

Man needs colour to live; it's just as necessary an element as fire and water. — Fernand Leger

Love is an element which though physically unseen is as real as air or water. It is an acting, living, moving force ... it moves in waves and currents like those of the ocean. — Prentice Mulford

It was a place where water brought together all elements. Water glittered with fire, water touched the banks of earth, water rippled with the touch of air. As for the fifth element, the Spirit that created all, it was as if the shape of the pool itself was a mark of Its Presence. — Joey W. Hill

Water IS the most important element on the face of the earth, because without water, there would be no WINE and without WINE I would be living in a PADDED CELL! — Tanya Masse

Try to understand why it is happening, from where it is coming, where the roots are, how it happens, how it functions, how it overpowers you, how in anger you become mad. Anger has happened before, it is happening now, but now add a new element to it, the element of understanding
and then the quality will change. Then, by and by, you will see that the more you understand anger, the less it happens. And when you understand it perfectly, it disappears. Understanding is like heat. When the heat comes to a particular point
one hundred degrees
the water disappears. — Rajneesh

She tried to focus on the element of riddle or at least puzzle contained in the letter and ignore the sense of doom that was sweeping through her like clouds rolling to the shore over open water. — Sara Sheridan

Spies are a most important element in water, because on them depends an army's ability to move. — Sun Tzu

Each part of your body corresponds with an element," the Maiden explained. "Your hair is air. How you toss your head, play with your hair - that is all for air magic. You can command the wind. Arms are for fire," she said, making fluttery, flame-like motions with her tendriled fingers and slim green arms. "Fire, fire elementals, electricity, light, and heat come from their movements. Water," she said, swaying her hips, "is from your center. This is why your middle must be free to move. And earth is the feet, where you make contact with the mother of us all. — Christie Golden

Why, then, does water-form the very basis of life in all life's various manifestations? Because water embraces everything is in and all through everything; because it rises above the distinctions between plants and animals and human beings; because it is a universal element shared by all; itself undetermined, yet determining; because, like the primal mother it is, it supplies the stuff of life to everything living. — Theodor Schwenk

What All The World Knows Water is the principle, or the element, of things. All things are water. — Plutarch

I'm probably never happier than when I'm by myself in the water. What I've worked and sacrificed for is not to be on stage playing music but to surf in some secluded place. It's a grounding element. Waves don't care who you are. — Eddie Vedder

The best fragrance is the scent of water, the fragrance of dew and rain falling on plants. Water is the essential element, a source of life and energy. A perfume that, like a garment, moves to suit the woman, her skin. A perfume that embraces a woman. — Issey Miyake

He's like a storybook spirit, a little djinn or something, except instead of air or water his element is imagination. — Robin Sloan

they contain the essence of the plant from which they were extracted. Actually, the term essential oil is short for the original term 'quintessential oil'. This is based on the Aristotelian idea that all matter is made up of four main elements (water, earth, air, and fire). Additionally, there was the fifth element, the quintessence, which was considered to be in spirit form or rather life force. Evaporation and distillation were viewed as ways of extracting the spirit from the plant. This has been reflected to even today's world where we can see the word 'spirits' being used to describe distilled alcoholic drinks such as eau de vie, whiskey and brandy. In the current days, the idea has been let go of since we know that essential oils are actually — Matt Hall

She has this curious heavy grace, like something out of its element making do in a heavier medium. Like she should be living in water. — Keri Hulme

Of the first philosophers, then, most thought the principles which were of the nature of matter were the only principles of all things. That of which all things that are consist, the first from which they come to be, the last into which they are resolved ... this they say is the element and this is the principle of things ... yet they do not all agree as to the number and the nature of these principle is water ... — Mary Hunter Austin

Condemning all women in order to help some misguided men get over their foolish behaviour is tantamount to denouncing fire, which is a vital and beneficial element, just because some people are burnt by it, or to cursing water just because some people are drowned in it. — Christine De Pizan

Money is like fire, an element as little troubled by moralising as earth, air, and water. Men can employ it as a tool or they can dance around it as if it were the incarnation of a god ... It acquires its meaning from the uses to which it is put. — Lewis H. Lapham

Works without faith are like a fish without water, it wants the element it should live in. A building without a basis cannot stand; faith is the foundation, and every good action is as a stone laid. — Owen Feltham

She could just distinguish his features, as he slept the perfect sleep. In this darkness, she seemed to see him so distinctly. But he was far off, in another world. Ah, she could shriek with torment, he was so far off, and perfected, in another world. She seemed to look at him as at a pebble far away under clear dark water. And here was she, left with all the anguish of consciousness, whilst he was sunk deep into the other element of mindless, remote, living shadow-gleam. He was beautiful, far-off, and perfected. They would never be together. Ah, this awful, inhuman distance which would always be interposed between her and the other being! There was nothing to do but to lie still and endure. She felt an overwhelming tenderness for him, and a dark, under-stirring of jealous hatred, that he should lie so perfect and immune, in an other-world, whilst she was tormented with violent wakefulness, cast out in the outer darkness. — D.H. Lawrence

Language is the element of definition, the defining and descriptive incantation. It puts the coin between our teeth. It whistles the boat up. It shows us the city of light across the water. Without language there is no poetry, without poetry there's just talk. Talk is cheap and proves nothing. Poetry is dear and difficult to come by. But it poles us across the river and puts a music in our ears. It moves us to contemplation. And what we contemplate, what we sing our hymns to and offer our prayers to, is what will reincarnate us in the natural world, and what will be our one hope for salvation in the What'sToCome. — Charles Wright

The reservation doesn't sing anymore but the songs still hang in the air. Every molecule waits for a drumbeat; every element dreams lyrics. Today I am walking between water, two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen, and the energy expelled is named Forgiveness. — Sherman Alexie

Action in war is like movement in a resistant element. Just as the simplest and most natural of movements, walking, cannot easily be performed in water, so in war, it is difficult for normal efforts to achieve even moderate results. — Carl Von Clausewitz

Water is also one of the four elements, the most beautiful of God's creations. It is both wet and cold, heavy, and with a tendency to descend, and flows with great readiness. It is this the Holy Scripture has in view when it says, "And the darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." Water, then, is the most beautiful element and rich in usefulness, and purifies from all filth, and not only from the filth of the body but from that of the soul, if it should have received the grace of the Spirit. — John Of Damascus

To me, there's never been a difference between electronic and acoustic. I've always had this idea that electricity is another element like wind or fire or water. — Patrick Wolf

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

Water is the most purifying element. It's always involved in baptisms, healings, that kind of work. — Eyvind Kang

Can one drown in one's element ... If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air? — Salman Rushdie

Taoism is the way of water. The most frequent element or symbol refered to in Lao Tzu's wrtings is the symbol of water. — Frederick Lenz

The mystery of creativeness is surrounded with awe. A special reverence does envelop the power to be co-creators with God in the making of human life. It is this hidden element that in a special way belongs to God, as does the grace of God in the sacraments. Those who speak of sex alone concentrate on the physical or visible element, forgetting the spiritual or invisible mystery of creativeness. Humans in the sacraments supply the act, the bread, the water, and the words; God supplies the grace, the mystery. In the sacred act of creating life, man and woman supply the unity of the flesh; God supplies the soul and the mystery. Such is the mystery of sex. — Fulton J. Sheen

You know, rust is just oxidation. The same chemical process as fire. Oxygen interacts with steel, electrons drift from one element to the other. So really, rust is a slow fire. Isn't that weird? Water causes something to burn. — Leah Raeder

You draw the mystical kundalini from the earth. Earth is an element. Fire, air, earth, water, and ether - the mystical kundalini comes through them all. — Frederick Lenz

One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in. — Marshall McLuhan

Crossing the Fens by boat there comes the realisation that water not earth or sky is the natural element in this landscape. — Stephanie Green

Nothing in our everyday experience gives us any reason for supposing that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen; and yet when we subject water to to certain rather drastic treatments, the nature of its constituent elements becomes manifest. Similarly, nothing in our everyday experience gives us much reason for supposing that the mind of the average sensual man has, as one of its constituents, something resembling, or identical with, the Reality substantial to the manifold world; and yet, when that mind is subjected to certain rather drastic treatments, the divine element, of which it is in part at least composed, becomes manifest, not only to the mind itself, but also, by its reflection in external behaviour, to other minds. — Aldous Huxley

I would put How Green Was My Valley in the same class as Uncle Tom's Cabin: a work that leaves an ineradicable "scratch on the mind," to borrow Harold Isaacs's useful phrase. There was another element as well. At a certain point, on some springy-turfed Welsh hillside far above the scenes of alienation and exploitation that lay below, young Huw contrived to part with his irksome virginity. Richard Llewellyn handled this transition with very slightly too much quasi-poetic euphemism, his crucial error being (to my fevered imagining) the idea that the inflamed heat of young manhood could be assuaged only by the relative "coolness" of a feminine interior. One had had a vague hope that the ardency would be appeased by an even greater heat, rather than sizzled like a red-hot horseshoe dipped in water, but at this stage I would have been willing to settle for anything that offered incandescence in either direction. — Christopher Hitchens

I remember from my school days Archimedes jumping into his bath and displacing water and coming up with his famous principle, and of course Isaac Newton being hit on the head with an apple. In other words, this realm of human knowledge - which is mathematical, essentially - can have a playful visual element to it. — James Marsh

Fire and Water are archetypes, the split sides of consciousness; one aware, the other, not. The two parts of us that desire synthesis, yet resist it: the self and the shadow. But they are also the element of chance, of the random roll of dice. — Chris Abani

She wanted George with some uncorrelated sector of Her Gart, she wanted George to correlate for her, life here, there. She wanted George to define and to make definable a mirage, a reflection of some lost incarnation, a wood maniac, a tree demon, a neuropathic dendrophile ... She wanted George to make the thing an integral, herself integrity. She wanted George to make one of his drastic statements that would dynamite her world away for her. She wanted this, but even as she wanted it she let herself sink further, further, she saw that her two hands reached toward George like the hands of a drowned girl. She knew she was not drowned. Where others would drown-lost, suffocated in this element-she knew that she lived. She had no complete right yet to this element, hands struggled to be pulled out. White hands waved above the water like sea spume or inland-growing pond flowers ... She wanted George to pull her out, she wanted George to push her in, let Her be drowned utterly. — H.D.

I love cities that are on the water. I love the water element, specifically the sea. I grew up on the sea and I grew up sailing - I love sailing - and the presence of the sea gives the air and the light a very special quality that I absolutely adore. — Connie Nielsen

Fire bursts inside me. My lips part under his. Coming up on my toes, I fist my hands in his hair and kiss him back, sharing the flames that lick at my soul. I breathe as he breathes, liquid heat in my veins.
He kisses me like I am water and he is parched. He is gentle and rough, taking and giving. In that moment, his kiss is all I know, all I ever want to know.
I come up higher on my toes and my lips cling to his as he pulls away. I'm left shaken and out of my element. I've never been kissed like that. I never imagined such a kiss existed. — Eve Silver

Hot water is my native element. I was in it as a baby, and I have never seemed to get out of it ever since. — Edith Sitwell

Water is the most essential element in life, because without it you can't make coffee. — Karen Salmansohn

I think that water is immediately interesting. It's just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright - it reflects you. — Seamus Heaney

Bare skin is the one and only right criterion for receiving water's gracious acceptance or any acceptance whatsoever from that element. But Pliny also seems to say something more: Stripping off not caution but the stale, crusty garments of preconception, peeling sensibly down to raw, new nakedness, is the only way to enter and be properly embraced by the world. — Janet Lembke

Regardless of the number of precautions that we take to save our necks, part of the attraction of going out on the water in the first place is the element of risk. — Harold Payson

If gold has been prized because it is the most inert element, changeless and incorruptible, water is prized for the opposite reason
its fluidity, mobility, changeability that make it a necessity and a metaphor for life itself. To value gold over water is to value economy over ecology, that which can be locked up over that which connects all things. — Rebecca Solnit

I do not know what inspires the image of a fish but it comes to me, wide eyed, open mouthed and gaping, glimmering, swimming towards me as though a creature of the darkness come to claim me. I imagine it in a twinkling blue pool. It swims through the dark currents of the sea, gliding above sea weed, beneath sunlight, augmenting and shying away from the surface. It belongs to this element between land and sky, sifts through it, a creature of the deep. My mind drifts, fades, but then comes back to the fish: its glimmering scales, its strange beady eyes. Its body is contained within the water. It opens its mouth, moving it open and closed as though it's trying to speak a language I never learned. I think about the fish's lungs, full of water. Is not the sea contained within the fish, too? — Annie Fisher

Water is the most expressive element in nature. It responds to every mood from tranquility to turbulence. — Walter J. Phillips

A world like that is not really natural, or (the thought strikes one later) perhaps it really is, only more so. Parts of it are neither land nor sea and so everything is moving from one element to another, wearing uneasily the queer transitional bodies that life adopts in such places. Fish, some of them, come out and breathe air and sit about watching you. Plants take to eating insects, mammals go back to the water and grow elongate like fish, crabs climb trees. Nothing stays put where it began because everything is constantly climbing in, or climbing out, of its unstable environment. — Loren Eiseley

It helps to think of a self as being like a drop of water that goes into the ocean and becomes one with the ocean.Each drop still exists but is now part of a much larger entity; yet it still does its small part as an element of the ocean.As significant as a single drop may appear,if it were not for all the drops,there would be no ocean. — David V. Gaggin

Fire was Mr. Long's chosen element; he had no sympathy with the rain. Yet he knew water was preordained to win, in the end. In man's end, at least. No vault or sepulcher could keep out the damp forever, and even ashes dissolved. — R.A. MacAvoy

How often, you wonder, has the direction of your life been shaped by such misunderstandings? How many opportunities have you been denied
or, for that matter, awarded
because someone failed to see you properly? How many friends have you lost, how many have you gained, because they glimpsed some element of your personality that shone through for only an instant, and in circumstances you could never reproduce? An illusion of water shimmering at the far bend of a highway. — Kevin Brockmeier