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If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.
Loran Eisley, The Immense Journey, 1957
Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious. Not necessary to life, but rather life itself, thou fillest us with a gratification that exceeds the delight of the senses.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars, 1939

This was a merchant who sold pills that had been invented to quench thirst. You need only swallow one pill a week, and you would feel no need of anything to drink. "Why are you selling those?" asked the little prince. "Because they save a tremendous amount of time," said the merchant. "Computations have been made by experts. With these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every week." "And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?" "Anything you like..." "As for me," said the little prince to himself, "if I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water."
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 1943
Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third thing, that makes water and nobody knows what that is.
D.H. Lawrence, Pansies, 1929
Only in quiet waters do things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world.
Hans Margolius

No one can see their reflection in running water. It is only in still water that we can see.
Taoist proverb

In order to reflect, think and plan, you must quiet yourself. You can’t see your reflection in churning waters. Water must be still to see your reflection.
Karen Susman, The Remarkable Networking Toolbox

Everywhere water is a thing of beauty, gleaming in the dewdrops; singing in the summer rain; shining in the ice-gems till the leaves all seem to turn to living jewels; spreading a golden veil over the setting sun; or a white gauze around the midnight moon.
John Ballantine Gough, A Glass of Water
I have left almost to the last the magic of water, an element which owing to its changefulness of form and mood and colour and to the vast range of its effects is ever the principal source of landscape beauty, and has like music a mysterious influence over the mind.
Sir George Sitwell (On the Making of Gardens)
The mystery of language was revealed to me.  I knew then that
‘W-A-T-E-R’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand.  That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, joy, set it free.
Helen Keller, The Story of My Life
Water is the most extraordinary substance! 
Practically all its properties are anomalous, which enabled life to use it as building material for its machinery.
Life is water dancing to the tune of solids.
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
Our bodies are molded rivers.
Novalis
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Steven Wrightfont
Ever wonder about those people who spend $2 apiece on those little bottles of Evian water? Try spelling Evian backward.
George Carlin
From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a link of it.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Scarlet

Water is insipid, inodorous, colorless and smooth.
Edmund Burke, on the sublime and beautiful, 1757
Water flows from high in the mountains
Water runs deep in the Earth
Miraculously, water comes to us,
And sustains all life.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Water sustains all.
Thales of Miletus, 600 B.C.

The wise man of Miletus thus declared the first of things is water.
J.S. Blackie, 1877

A man of wisdom delights in water.
Confucius, Analects
In every glass of water we drink, some of the water has already passed through fishes, trees, bacteria, worms in the soil, and many other organisms, including people.
Elliot A. Norse, Animal Extinctions
One day, someone showed me a glass of water that was half full. And he said, "Is it half full or half empty?" So I drank the water. No more problem.
Alexander Jodorowsky
You could write the story of man's growth in terms of his epic concerns with water.
Bernard Frank
Water is the only substance on earth that is naturally present in three different forms - as a liquid, a solid (ice) and as a gas (water vapor).
Author unknown
All the waters run to the sea and yet the sea is not full, and from the place where they began, thither they return again.
Ecclesiastes
We call upon the waters that rim the earth, horizon to horizon, that flow in our rivers and streams, that fall upon our gardens and fields, and we ask that they teach us and show us the way.
Native American, Chinook Blessing Litany.

Gutta cavat lapidem (Dripping water hollows out a stone)
Ovid, Epistulae Ex Ponto, Book 3, no. 10, 1. 5

The drops of rain make a hole in the stone, not by violence, but by oft falling.
Lucretius

Rain! whose soft architectural hands have power to cut stones, and chisel to shapes of grandeur the very mountains.
Henry Ward Beecher

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.
Henry David Thoreau
Water flows humbly to the lowest level.
Nothing is weaker than water,
Yet for overcoming what is hard and strong,
Nothing surpasses it.
Lao-Tzu, Chinese philosopher (6th century B.C.)
The sound of water says what I think.
Chuang Tzu (c.360 BC - c. 275 BC)
When you hear the splash
Of the water drops that fall
Into the stone bowl
You will feel that all the dust
Of your mind is washed away.
Sen-No-Rikyu

The Waters are Nature's storehouse in which she locks up her wonders.
Isaac Waltonn
Water is the driver of Nature.
Leonardo da Vinci

When you put your hand in a flowing stream, you touch the last that has gone before and the first of what is still to come.
Leonardo da Vinci

In time and with water, everything changes.
Leonardo da Vinci
If you gave me several million years, there would be nothing that did not grow in beauty if it were surrounded by water.
Jan Erik Vold, What All The World Knows
Water is the principle, or the element, of things.
All things are water.
Plutarch, Placita philosophorum, about A.D. 46
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
W.H. Auden (1907 - 1993)
Water is the basis of life and the blue arteries of the earth! Everything in the non-marine environment depends on freshwater to survive.
Sandra Postel
To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.
Barry Lopez
By means of water, we give life to everything.
Koran, 21:30
If water is too clear, it will not contain fish; people who are too cautious will never gain wisdom.
Chinese proverb
In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is strength, in water there is bacteria.
David Auerbach (2002)
The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl.
Dave Barry

Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer.
Dave Barry
Drink no longer water but use a little wine for thy stomach's sake and thine often infirmities.
St. Paul, 1 Timothy 5:23
God made only water, but man made wine.
Victor Hugo
Wine is sunlight, held together by water.
Galileo Gallilei
In water one sees one's own face; But in wine, one beholds the heart of another.
French proverb
Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter, Sermons and soda-water the day after.
Lord Byron, Don Juan
And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine, "I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine."
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Fish, to taste good, must swim three times: in water, in butter, and in wine.
Proverb
Between each wine and each dish one should drink a mouthful of pure fresh water, preferably not (or only slightly) aerated.
Paul Ramain (French doctor)
...all the charming and beautiful things, from the Song of Songs, to bouillabaisse, and from the nine Beethoven symphonies to the Martini cocktail, have been given to humanity by men who, when the hour came, turned from tap water to something with color in it, and more in it than mere oxygen and hydrogen.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
No poems can live long or please that are written by water-drinkers.
Horace, Roman lyric poet (65 -8 B.C.)
A man who drinks only water has a secret to hide from his fellow men.
Charles Baudelaire, French poet (1821-1867)
There was a Young Person in pink,
Who called out for something to drink;
But they said, 'O my daughter, there's nothing but water!'
Which vexed that Young Person in pink.
Edward Lear
Before Noah, men having only water to drink, could not find the truth. Accordingly...they became abominably wicked, and they were justly exterminated by the water they loved to drink. This good man, Noah, having seen that all his contemporaries had perished by this unpleasant drink, took a dislike to it; and God, to relieve his dryness, created the vine and revealed to him the art of making le vin. By the aid of this liquid he unveiled more and more truth.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

We hear of the conversion of water into wine at the marriage in Cana as of a miracle. But this conversion is, through the goodness of God, made every day before our eyes. Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, and which incorporates itself with the grapes, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.
Benjamin Franklin

Take counsel in wine, but resolve afterwards in water.
Benjamin Franklin
The formula for water is H2O. Is the formula for an ice cube H2O2?
Lily Tomlin
When the water of a place is bad it is safest to drink none that has not been filtered through either the berry of a grape, or else a tub of malt. These are the most reliable filters yet invented. .
Samuel Butler, Samuel Butler's Notebooks (1951, p. 255)
When the well is dry, we learn the worth of water.
Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanac (1746?)

We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.
Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732

When you're thirsty, it's too late to think about digging a well.
Japanese Proverb

You don't miss your water until your well runs dry.
an old country proverb
Don't empty the water jar until the rain falls.
Philippine proverb
Potable, n. Suitable for drinking. Water is said to be potable; indeed, some declare it our natural beverage, although even they find it palatable only when suffering from the recurrent disorder known as thirst, for which it is a medicine.
Ambrose Bierce, American writer (1842-1914)
I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man.
Henry David Thoreau

A man may acquire a taste for wine or brandy, and so lose his love for water, but should we not pity him.
Henry David Thoreau

Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody.
Mark Twain
I never drink water. I'm afraid it will become habit-forming.
W.C. Fields (1880-1946)

Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.
W.C. Fields(1880-1946)

Once... in the wilds of Afghanistan, I lost my corkscrew, and we were forced to live on nothing but food and water for days.
W.C. Fields, My Little Chickadee.
It ain't no use to grumble and complain;
It's jest as cheap and easy to rejoice;
When God sorts out the weather and sends rain,
Why, rain's my choice.
James Whitcomb Riley, Rain, 1849 – 1916

For after all the best thing one can do when
it is raining, is to let it rain.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man.
Stewart Udall
Water is the lifeblood of our bodies, our economy, our nation and our well-being.
Stephen Johnson, EPA Administrator
The care of rivers is not a question of rivers but of the human heart.
Tanaka Shozo, c. 1900
All day I face the barren waste without the taste of water,
Cool water.
Old Dan and I with throats burned dry and souls that cry for water,
Cool water.
The nights are cool and I'm a fool each stars a pool of water,
Cool water.
But with the dawn I'll wake and yawn and carry on to water,
Cool water.
We think of our land and water and human resources not as static and sterile possessions but as lifegiving assets to be directed by wise provisions for future days.
Franklin D. Rooseveltt
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.
Unknown author
Water is life's matter and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water.
Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Hungarian biochemist and Nobel Prize Winner for Medicine.
A river seems a magic thing. A magic, moving, living part of the very earth itself.
Laura Gilpin
A river is more than an amenity, it is a treasure.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
Water is the soul of the earth.
attributed to Robert A Swanson & W.H. Auden

When you drink the water, remember the spring.
Chinese Proverb
To get clear water, one must go to the source.
French Proverb

Dirty water will quench few.
French 16th Century Proverb

There is no small pleasure in sweet water. [Lat., Est in aqua dulci non invidiosa voluptas.]
Author: Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)
Water is the blood in our veins.
Levi Eshkol, Israeli Prime Minister, 1962

What is the earth but a lump of clay surrounded by water?
Bharthari (c.570-c.651), Vairagya-sataka
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.
William Ashworth, Nor Any Drop to Drink, 1982

There are also kinds of water that cause death, as they run through harmful juices in the soil and become poisonous.
Vitruvius, On Architecture, 1st century B.C
We are a water-drinking people, and we are allowing every brook to be defiled.
George Bird Grinnell, Outdoor America, February 1925

If you saw what the river carried, you would never drink the water.
Jamaican Proverb

He who drinks a tumbler of London water has literally in his stomach more animated beings than there are men, women, and children on the face of the globe.
Syndney Smith, Letter to Countess Grey, November 19, 1834

Filthy water cannot be washed.
African proverb

Til taught by pain, men really know not what good water is worth.
From "Don Juan" by Byronn

The sewer is the conscience of the city.
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, 1862

In order for something to become clean, something else must become dirty.
Imbesi, Imbesi's Conservation of Filth Law

The frog does not drink up the pond in which he lives.
Native American Proverb

Water is the most precious, limited natural resource we have in this country...But because water belongs to no one - except the people - special interests, including government polluters, use it as their private sewers.
Ralph Nader
We're all downstream.
Ecologist's motto adopted by Margaret & Jim Drescher

Water is the one substance from which the earth can conceal nothing; it sucks out its innermost secrets and brings them to our very lips.
Jean Giraudoux, The Madwoman of Chaillot, 1946

Man is a complex being; he makes deserts bloom and lakes die.
Gil Stern
In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water along with other resources has become the victim of his indifference.
Rachel Carson
Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.
Jacques Cousteau

We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.
Jacques Cousteau
Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It's called rain.
Michael McClary
Anyone who can solve the problems of water will be worthy of two Nobel prizes - one for peace and one for science.
John F. Kennedy
A man from the west will fight over three things: water, women and gold, and usually in that order.
Senator Barry Goldwater, AZ

In the Western United States, water flows uphill to money.
Glen Sanders

Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.
Unknown (widely attributed to Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain), but this is under dispute)
The River... It's my world, and I don't want any other. What it hasn't got is not worth having, and what it doesn't know is not worth knowing. Lord! the times we've had together!
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

You could not step twice into the same rivers; for other waters are
ever flowing on to you.
Heraclitus of Ephesus

To serve the cause of water adequately... We must get to know it in its true being. And how do we do this? Why, by treating it in the very way exemplified by its own behavior; that is, whenever we encounter it, we wash the tablet of our souls clean of all other impressions in order to allow the being of water to make its imprint on us.
Theodor Schwenk, Water: The Element of Life

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.
Sandra Postel, Last Oasis: Facing Water Scarcity

Water is the most basic of all resources. Civilizations grew or withered depending on its availability..
Dr. Nathan W. Snyder, Ralph M. Parsons Engineering
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.
Luna Leopold
The air, the water and the ground are free gifts to man and no one has the power to portion them out in parcels. Man must drink and breathe and walk and therefore each man has a right to his share of each.
James Fennimore Cooper
A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, "The Ponds" (1854)
It is water, in every form and at every scale, that saturates the mind.
All the water that will ever be is, right now.
National Geographic, October 1993
Here was a thing which had not changed; a score of years had not affected the water’s mulatto complexion in the least; a score of centuries would succeed no better, perhaps. It comes out of the turbulent, bank-carving Missouri, and every tumblerful of it hold nearly an acre of land in solution. I got this fact from the bishop of the diocese. If you will let your glass stand half an hour, you can separate the land from the water as easy as Genesis; and you will find them both good: the one is good to eat, the other is good to drink. The land is very nourishing, the water is thoroughly wholesome. The one appeases hunger; the other thirst. But the natives do not take them separately, but together, as nature mixed them. When they find an inch of mud in the bottom of the glass, they stir it up and then take the draught as they would gruel. It is difficult for a stranger to get used to this batter, but once used to it, he will prefer it to water. This is really the case. It is good for steamboating, and good to drink; but it is worthless for all other purposes, except baptizing.
 Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain), Life on the Mississippipi

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.
Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain)

My books are water; those of great geniuses are wine. Everybody drinks water.
Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain)
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 colour 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.
Leonardo da Vinci
When oxygen and hydrogen find one another, their joining produces fiery passion. Out of this fire, water is born. Quaint Victorian chemistry gives us an image of one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms in a fixed molecule that bounces around from place to place. The reality of water is not so orderly. The hydrogen atoms are not owned by any particular oxygen atom. Water is a substance very much in love with itself, and the atoms connect in webs and clusters where oxygen shares around the hydrogen atoms freely, a fluid situation indeed.
Ian D. Anderson, Ian Lurking Bear
1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness [was] upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4. And God saw the light, that [it was] good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
6. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
7. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which [were] under the firmament from the waters which [were] above the firmament: and it was so.
8. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
9. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry [land] appear: and it was so.
10. And God called the dry [land] Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that [it was] good...
20. ...And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl [that] may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
21. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that [it was] good.
22. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
23. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
Genesis, Chapter 1, King James translation of the Bible

10: He sendeth the springs into the valleys, which run among the hills.
11: They give drink to every beast of the field: the wild asses quench their thirst.
12: By them shall the fowls of the heaven have their habitation, which sing among the branches.
13: He watereth the hills from his chambers: the earth is satisfied with the fruit of thy works.
Psalms, Chapter 104, King James translation of the Bible

23. Be glad then, ye children of Zion, and rejoice in the LORD your God: for he hath given you the former rain moderately, and he will cause to come down for you the rain, the former rain, and the latter rain in the first month.
24. And the floors shall be full of wheat, and the vats shall overflow with wine and oil.
Joel, Chapter 2, King James translation of the Bible