Water Quotes"The top three conservation issues in Texas are water, water and water." No natural resource has greater significance for the future of Texas than water. "As Texans we all have a role to play in managing our aquatic resources. Whether we know it or not, we all live in a watershed. The raindrops that fall in our lawns, fields, woods and pastures ultimately either replenish an aquifer or flow into a creek or stream. As a result, the actions we take and the decisions we make with how we use, manage, conserve and value water impact the needs of those downstream, including our fish and wildlife. Our aquifers, springs, creeks, rivers, bays, estuaries and gulf waters need you more than ever." A child who loves to fish will become an adult who will work to protect our fisheries. A child who loves to canoe will become an adult who will fight to protect our rivers. We will fail them miserably if we do not make the effort to engage them in both the joys and responsibilities if using and caring for our water resources for the they are the voters and taxpayers of the future. More important, if children grow up without the opportunities we have had in our lifetimes to experience the spectacular aquatic environment of our state, they will miss one of the greatest joys and privileges of being Texans. Water. Oil pales beside it, and the value of the land itself is measured by it. Water links us to our neighbor in a way more profound and complex than any other. Water has a voice. It carries a message that tells those downstream who you are and how you care for the land. Rivers are ribbons that tie us to the spirit of the land. A river is the report card for its watershed. Rivers are places that renew our spirit, connect us with our past, and link us directly with the flow and rhythm of the natural world. Water sustains all. All the water that will ever be is, right now. Let us have a splendid
legacy for our children…
let us turn to them and
say 'this you inherit and
guard it well, for it is far
more precious than
money… and once it is
destroyed, nature's
beauty cannot be
repurchased at any
price.' Wild rivers are earth's
renegades, defying
gravity, dancing to their
own tunes, resisting the
authority of humans,
always chipping away,
and eventually always
winning. Water is the driver of Nature. The frog does not drink up the pond in which he lives. If you could tomorrow morning make water clean in the world, you would have done, in one fell swoop, the best thing you could have done for improving human health by improving environmental quality. We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one. Children of a culture born in a water-rich environment, we have never really learned how important water is to us. We understand it, but we do not respect it. By means of water, we give life to everything. Man - despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments - owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains. When you drink the water, remember the spring. Till taught by pain, men know not water's worth. When the well is dry, we know the worth of water. I really don't know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it's because in addition to the fact that the sea changes, and the light changes, and ships change, it's because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea -- whether it is to sail or to watch it -- we are going back from whence we came. Thousands have lived without love, not one without water. Water should not be judged by its history, but by its quality Water is a very good servant, but it is a cruel master. Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It's called rain. An ocean refuses no river. For many of us, water simply flows from a faucet, and we think little about it beyond this point of contact. We have lost a sense of respect for the wild river, for the complex workings of a wetland, for the intricate web of life that water supports. "You'll never miss the water 'til the well runs dry." The song of the river ends not at her banks but in the hearts of those who have loved her. Rivers are inherently interesting. They mold landscapes, create fertile deltas, provide trade routes, a source for food and water; a place to wash and play; civilizations emerged next to rivers in China, India, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. They sustain life and bring death and destruction. They are ferocious at times; gentle at times. They are placid and mean. They trigger conflict and delineate boundaries. Rivers are the stuff of metaphor and fable, painting and poetry. Rivers unite and divide -- a thread that runs from source to exhausted release. A river seems a magic thing. A magic, moving, living part of the very earth itself. I have never seen a river that I could not love. Moving water . . . has a fascinating vitality. It has power and grace and associations. It has a thousand colors and a thousand shapes, yet it follows laws so definite that the tiniest streamlet is an exact replica of a great river. . . . the time has also come to identify and preserve free-flowing stretches of our great rivers before growth and development make the beauty of the unspoiled waterway a memory. I started out thinking of America as highways and state lines. As I got to know it better, I began to think of it as rivers. Most of what I love about the country is a gift of the rivers. . . . America is a great story, and there is a river on every page of it. Rivers run through our history and folklore, and link us as a people. They nourish and refresh us and provide a home for dazzling varieties of fish and wildlife and trees and plants of every sort. We are a nation rich in rivers. In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it. Water is the most critical resource issue of our lifetime and our children's lifetime. The health of our waters is the principal measure of how we live on the land. To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together. A river, though, has so many things to say that it is hard to know what it says to each of us. We let a river shower its banks with a spirit that invades the people living there, and we protect that river, knowing that without its blessings the people have no source of soul. Can we afford clean water? Can we afford rivers and lakes and streams and oceans which continue to make possible life on this planet? Can we afford life itself? Those questions were never asked as we destroyed the waters of our nation, and they deserve no answers as we finally move to restore and renew them. These questions answer themselves. The river moves from land to water to land, in and out of organisms, reminding us what native peoples have never forgotten: that you cannot separate the land from the water, or the people from the land. Rivers are magnets for the imagination, for conscious pondering and subconscious dreams, thrills, fears. People stare into the moving water, captivated, as they are when gazing into a fire. What is it that draws and holds us? The rivers' reflections of our lives and experiences are endless . . . The river is the center of the land, the place where the waters, and much more, come together. Here is the home of wildlife, the route of explorers, and recreation paradise. . . . A river does not just happen; it has a beginning and and end. Its story is written in rich earth, in ice, and in water-carved stone, and its story as the lifeblood of the land is filled with color, music and thunder. Who hears the rippling of rivers will not utterly despair of anything. "Water is sometimes sharp and sometimes strong, sometimes acid and sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet and sometimes thick or thin, sometimes it is seen bringing hurt or pestilence, sometime health-giving, sometimes poisonous. It suffers change into as many natures as are the different places through which it passes. And as the mirror changes with the color of its subject, so it alters with the nature of the place, becoming noisome, laxative, astringent, sulfurous, salty, incarnadined, mournful, raging, angry, red, yellow, green, black, blue, greasy, fat or slim. Sometimes it starts a conflagration, sometimes it extinguishes one; is warm and is cold, carries away or sets down, hollows out or builds up, tears or establishes, fills or empties, raises itself or burrows down, speeds or is still; is the cause at times of life or death, or increase or privation, nourishes at times and at others does the contrary; at times has a tang, at times is without savor, sometimes submerging the valleys with great floods. In time and with water, everything changes." Water is the soul of the Earth. “I shall now confess to you that none of those three trout had to be beheaded, or folded double, to fit their casket. What was big was not the trout, but the chance. What was full was not my creel, but my memory.” "Many go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after." Water, water, water…There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount, a perfect ratio of water to rock. Of water to sand, insuring that wide, free, open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here, unless you try to establish a city where no city should be. In the West, whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting. Boundaries don't protect rivers, people do.
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