The quotes below express eloquently why we at ROW are so passionate about the rivers we raft. We can only imagine many of these quotes came directly from our favorite rivers like the Futaleufu RiverLower Salmon River, the Snake River and the Middle Fork of the Salmon. Enjoy!

The care of rivers is not a question of rivers, but of the human heart.
- Tanako Shozo

Swift or smooth, broad as the Hudson or narrow enough to scrape your gunwales, every river is a world of its own, unique in pattern and personality. Each mile on a river will take you further from home than a hundred miles on a road.
- Bob Marshall

Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.
- A. A. Milne, Pooh's Little Instruction Book

What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn't have any doubt it is sure to get where it is going, and it doesn't want to go anywhere else.
- Hal Boyle

The song of the river ends not at her banks, but in the hearts of those who have loved her.
- Buffalo - Joe

The mark of a successful man is one that has spent an entire day on the bank of a river without feeling guilty about it.
- Chinese Philosopher

The Sun shines not on us but in us. The Rivers flow not past, But through us.
- John Muir

The river has taught me to listen; you will learn from it, too. The river knows everything; one can learn everything from it. You have already learned from the river that it is good to strive downwards, to sink, to seek the depths.
- Herman Hesse (1877-1962), Siddharta, 1922

We labor long and earnestly for peace, because war threatens the survival of man. It is time we labored with equal passion to defend our environment. A polluted stream can be as lethal as a bullet.
- Senator Alan Bible (Nevada)

Clean water is not an expenditure of Federal funds; clean water is an investment in the future of our country.
- Bob Shuster, U.S. Representative, quoted in Washington Post, 9 January 1987

I see an America whose rivers and valleys and lakes hills and streams and plains the mountains over our land and nature's wealth deep under the earth are protected as the rightful heritage of all the people.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt

The public must retain control of the great waterways. It is essential that any permit to obstruct them for reasons and on conditions that seem good at the moment should be subject to revision when changed conditions demand.
- Teddy Roosevelt, 1908

The good life on any river may...depend on the perception of its music, and the preservation of some music to perceive.
- Aldo Leopold

Rivers have what man most respects and longs for in his own life and thoughta capacity for renewal and replenishment, continual energy, creativity, cleansing.
- John M. Kauffmann, EPA Journal. May 1981

... the time has also come to identify and preserve freeflowing stretches of our great rivers before growth and development make the beauty of the unspoiled waterway a memory.
- President Lyndon Johnson's Message on Natural Beauty

A river is more than an amenity.... It is a treasure. It offers a necessity of life that must be rationed among those who have power over it.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935), U.S. Supreme Court justice, New Jersey v. New York, 4 May 1931

I like rivers
Better than oceans, for we see both sides.
An ocean is forever asking questions
And writing them aloud along the shore
- Edwin Arlington Robinson, Roman Bartholow, Part 111

There is no rushing a river. When you go there, you go at the pace of the water and that pace ties you into a flow that is older than life on this planet. Acceptance of that pace, even for a day, changes us, reminds us of other rhythms beyond the sound of our own heartbeats.
- Jeff Rennicke, River Days: Travels on Western Rivers

I wish to make it clear to you, there is not sufficient water to irrigate all the lands which could be irrigated, and only a small portion can be irrigated....I tell you, gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict!
- John Wesley Powell, Speech, Los Angeles International Irrigation Conference, 1893

Water is the principle, or the element, of things
All things are water.
- Plutarch, (about A.D. 46after A.D. 119), Placita philosophorum

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. We have been quick to assume rights to use water but slow to recognize obligations to preserve and protect it... In short, we need a water ethica guide to right conduct in the face of complex decisions about natural systems we do not and cannot fully understand.
- Sandra Postel, Last Oasis: Facing Water Scarcity

Streams represent constant rebirth. The water flows in, forever new, yet forever the same; they complete a journey from beginning to end, and then they embark on the journey again.
- Tim Palmer, Lifelines

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. . . . Only fragments of our inheritance remain unexploited, but these streams are more valuable than ever.
- Tim Palmer, Lifelines

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.
- Lynn Noel, Voyages: Canada's Heritage Rivers

The first river you paddle runs through the rest of your life. It bubbles up in pools and eddies to remind you who you are.
- Lynn Noel, Voyages: Canada's Heritage Rivers

Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.
- A. A. Milne, Pooh's Little Instruction Book

What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone,
in the forest, at night, cherished by this
wonderful, unintelligible,
perfectly innocent speech,
the most comforting speech in the world,
the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges,
and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!
Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it.
It will talk as long as it wants this rain.
As long as it talks I am going to listen.
- Thomas Merton, 1983, Raids on the Unspeakable

We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.
- Jacques Cousteau

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 DaVinci

To trace the history of a river or a raindrop...is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both, we constantly seek and stumble upon divinity, which like feeding the lake, and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls, and feeds itself all over again.
- From Islands, The Universe, Home, 1991 Gretel Ehrlich

A river seems a magic thing. A magic, moving, living part of the very earth itself.
- From The Rio Grande, 1949 Laura Gilpin

"SothisisaRiver"
"THE River," corrected the Rat.
"And you really live by the river? What a jolly life!"
"By it and with it and on it and in it," said the Rat. "It's brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. 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..."
- From the Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahme

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.
- Roderick HaigBrown

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

What would the world be, once bereft of wet and wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
- Gerard Manley Hopkins 1844-1889

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.
- From The Magic of Rivers, Charles Kuralt

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.
- Charles Kuralt

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

A river is the report card for its watershed.
- Alan Levere CT - DEP

To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.
- Barry Lopez

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops under the rocks are the words and some of the words are theirs.
- From A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclan

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.
- Thomas Moore

A river sings a holy song conveying the mysterious truth that we are a river, and if we are ignorant of this natural law, we are lost.
- From the ReEnchantment of Everyday Life by Thomas Moore

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. Our planet is beset with a cancer which threatens our very existence and which will not respond to the kind of treatment that has been prescribed in the past. The cancer of water pollution was engendered by our abuse of our lakes, streams, rivers, and oceans; it has thrived on our halfhearted attempts to control it; and like any other disease, it can kill us. We have ignored this cancer for so long that the romance of environmental concern is already fading in the shadow of the grim realities of lakes, rivers and bays where all forms of life have been smothered by untreated wastes, and oceans which no longer provide us with food.
- Tim Palmer

Rivers are magnets for the imagination, for conscious pondering and subconscious dreams, thrills and 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 water calls up our own ambitions of flowing with ease, of navigating the unknown. Streams represent constant rebirth. The waters flow in, forever new, yet forever the same; they complete a journey from beginning to end, and then they embark on the journey again.
- From Lifelines by Tim Palmer

When we save a river, we save a major part of an ecosystem, and we save ourselves as well because of our dependencephysical, economic, spiritual,on the water and its community of life.
- The Wild and Scenic Rivers of America by Tim Palmer

Anything else you're interested in is not going to happen if you can't breathe the air and drink the water. Don't sit this one out. Do something. You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely critical moment in the history of our planet.
- Carl Sagan

I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again. I was fascinated by how it sped by and yet was always there; its roar shook both the earth and me.
- Wallace Stegner

To the lost man, to the pioneer penetrating a new country, to the naturalist who wishes to see the wild land at its wildest, the advice is always the same follow a river. The river is the original forest highway. It is nature's own Wilderness Road.
- Edwin Way Teale

I chatter, chatter as I flow to join the brimming river, for men may come and men may go, but I go on forever.
- From The Brook, 1887 Lord Tennyson

Rivers must have been the guides which conducted the footsteps of the first travelers. They are the constant lure, when they flow by our doors, to distant enterprise and adventure, and, by a natural impulse, the dwellers on their banks will at length accompany their currents to the lowlands of the globe, or explore at their invitation the interior of continents.
- Henry David Thoreau

To the lost man, to the pioneer penetrating a new country, to the naturalist who wishes to see the wild land at its wildest, the advice is always the same follow a river. The river is the original forest highway. It is nature's own Wilderness Road.
- Edwin Way Teale

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed, if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.
- Wallace Steger, Earth Prayers from Around the World, 1991

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