Life Is Like A Flowing River Quotes

Life is like a flowing river. Just like the speed of time, it will never come back. ~ Debasish Mridha

Few things are harder to visualise than that a cold snowbound landscape, so marrow-chillingly quiet and lifeless, will, within mere months, be green and lush and warm, quivering with all manner of life, from birds warbling and flying through the trees to swarms of insects hanging in scattered clusters in the air. Nothing in the winter landscape presages the scent of sun-warmed heather and moss, trees bursting with sap and thawed lakes ready for spring and summer, nothing presages the feeling of freedom that can come over you when the only white that can be seen is the clouds gliding across the blue sky above the blue water of the rivers gently flowing down to the sea, the perfect, smooth, cool surface, broken now and then by rocks, rapids and bathing bodies. It is not there, it does not exist, everything is white and still, and if the silence is broken it is by a cold wind or a lone crow caw-cawing. But it is coming ... it is coming... One evening in March the snow turns to rain, and the piles of snow collapse. One morning in April there are buds on the trees, and there is a trace of green in the yellow grass. Daffodils appear, white and blue anemones too. Then the warm air stands like a pillar among the trees on the slopes. On sunny inclines buds have burst, here and there cherry trees are in blossom. If you are sixteen years old all of this makes an impression, all of this leaves its mark, for this is the first spring you know is spring, with all your sense you know this is ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

Life is an ever-flowing process and somewhere on the path some unpleasant things will pop up - it might leave a scar, but then life is flowing, and like running water, when it stops it grows stale. Go bravely on, my friend, because each experience teaches us a lesson. Keep blasting because life is such that sometimes it is nice and sometimes it is not. ~ Bruce Lee

Love, being in love, isn't a constant thing. It doesn't always flow at the same strength. It's not always like a river in flood. It's more like the sea. It has tides, it ebbs and flows. The thing is, when love is real, whether it's ebbing or flowing, it's always there, it never goes away. And that's the only proof you can have that it is real, and not just a crush or an infatuation or a passing fancy ~ Aidan Chambers

How did he know my dad helped get me this job? Did someone in the office tell him? I mean, it's not like I'm some spoiled, incompetent rich kid with zero work experience and mega connections. My dad's just aCPA! But I'm not going to bother explaining that or anything else. Because right now, I'm halfway convinced a hole in my skull has blown right off and my brains are flowing out like molten lava. I think I might well and truly hate Porter Roth.

"You know nothing about me or my family. And you're a goddamn dickbag, you know that?" I say, so enraged that I don't even care that a family of four is walking up to my window. I should have. And I should have noticed that I left the green switch turned on from the last pair of tickets I sold. But the family's wide-eyed faces clue me in now.

They've heard every nasty word.

For one terrible moment, the booth spins around me. I apologize profusely, but the parents aren't happy. At all. Why should they be? Oh God, is the wife wearing a crucifix pendant? What if these people are fundamentalists? Are these kids homeschooled? Did I just ruin them for life? Jesus fu - I mean, fiddlesticks. Are they going to ask to speak to Mr. Cavadini? Am I going to be fired? On my first day? What is my dad going to say? ~ Jenn Bennett

...for a piece of famous fluffiness that doesn't just pretend about what real lives can be like, but moves on into one of the world's least convincing pretences about what people themselves are like, consider the teased and coiffed nylon monument that is 'Imagine': surely the My Little Pony of philosophical statements. John and Yoko all in white, John at the white piano, John drifting through the white rooms of a white mansion, and all the while the sweet drivel flowing. Imagine there's no heaven. Imagine there's no hell. Imagine all the people, living life in - hello? Excuse me? Take religion out of the picture, and everybody spontaneously starts living life in peace? I don't know about you, but in my experience peace is not the default state of human beings, any more than having an apartment the size of Joey and Chandler's is. Peace is not the state of being we return to, like water running downhill, whenever there's nothing external to perturb us. Peace between people is an achievement, a state of affairs we put together effortfully in the face of competing interests, and primate dominance dynamics, and our evolved tendency to cease our sympathies at the boundaries of our tribe. ~ Francis Spufford

Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, [...] came to teach [the ancient inhabitants of Mexico] the benefits of settled agriculture and the skills necessary to build temples. Although this deity is frequently depicted as a serpent, he is more often shown in human form--the serpent being his symbol and his alter ego--and is usually described as "a tall bearded white man" ... "a mysterious person ... a white man with a strong formation of body, broad forehead, large eyes and a flowing beard." Indeed, [...] the attributes and life history of Quetzalcoatl are so human that it is not improbable that he may have been an actual historical character ... the memory of whose benefactions lingered after his death, and whose personality was eventually deified. The same could very well be said of Oannes--and just like Oannes at the head of the Apkallu (likewise depicted as prominently bearded) it seems that Quetzalcoatl traveled with his own brotherhood of sages and magicians. We learn that they arrived in Mexico "from across the sea in a boat that moved by itself without paddles," and that Quetzalcoatl was regarded as having been "the founder of cities, the framer of laws and the teacher of the calendar. ~ Graham Hancock

What makes a kingdom great is its being like a down-flowing river,
the central point towards which all the smaller streams under Heaven converge; or like the female throughout the world, who by quiescence always overcomes the male. And quiescence is a form of humility. ~ Laozi

Outside, beyond what is right and wrong, there exists a vast field. We will find each other there ~ Paulo Coelho

A Woman in harmony with her spirit
is like a river flowing.
She goes where she will without pretense and arrives at her destination
prepared to be herself
and only herself ~ Maya Angelou

When you choose, you divide. Then you say, "This is good, that is wrong." And life is a unity. Existence remains undivided, existence remains in a deep unison. It is oneness. If you say, "This is beautiful and that is ugly," mind has entered, because life is both together. And the beautiful becomes ugly, and the ugly goes on becoming beautiful. There is no boundary; no watertight compartments are there. Life goes on flowing from this to that.

Mind has fixed compartments. Fixedness is the nature of mind and fluidity is the nature of life. That's why mind is obsession; it is always fixed, it has a solidness about it. And life is not solid; it is fluid, flexible, goes on moving to the opposite.

Something is alive this moment, next moment is dead. Someone was young this moment, next moment he has become old. The eyes were so beautiful, now they are no more there – just ruins. The face was so rose-like, now nothing is there – not even a ghost of the past. Beautiful becomes ugly, life becomes death, and death goes on taking new birth.

What to do with life? You cannot choose. If you want to be WITH life, with the whole, you have to be choiceless. ~ Osho

I know that one day he will lose to the waterfall, slip behind its turbulent curtain forever, lost to me like something out of a fairy tale. But in our story, there's no villain, no witch, no fairy godmother, no moral imperative or cautionary conclusion. No happily-ever-after. It just is. It's life. The water keeps flowing as we come and go. We were never forever, Jamie and I. Nothing is in this life. But if you love someone, and are loved by someone, you might find forever after. Whatever and wherever that is. ~ Julia Whelan

Love is never a relationship; love is relating. It is always a river, flowing, unending. Love knows no full stop; the honeymoon begins but never ends. It is not like a novel that starts at a certain point and ends at a certain point. It is an ongoing phenomenon. Lovers end, love continues - it is a continuum. It is a verb, not a noun. And why do we reduce the beauty of relating to relationship? Why are we in such a hurry? Because to relate is insecure, and relationship is a security. Relationship has a certainty; relating is just a meeting of two strangers, maybe just an overnight stay and in the morning we say goodbye. Who knows what is going to happen tomorrow? And we are so afraid that we want to make it certain, we want to make it predictable. We would like tomorrow to be according to our ideas; we don't allow it freedom to have its own say. So we immediately reduce every verb to a noun. You ~ Osho

Lift your head to me ... '
His is the kiss of a timorous lover. Feel his inhuman lips on the throat, the heat of it. The bite, when it comes, is cold. Begin to sink as the blood flows into his mouth; it is almost soothing. No pain. No pain at all. His teeth grind into the muscles; ecstasy and torment. Life, the very being, is flowing out. Unholy nourishment. Holy nourishment. Drained slowly.
The trauma of it feels like being torn, but it is no more than suddenly having the ability to experience reality in a different way. Waiting for the end ... for what? Cannot foretell. No longer flesh, no longer blood. Soul. Free. ~ Storm Constantine

Rush-hour on the A rain. A blind man
staggers forth, his cane tapping lightly
own the aisle. He leans against the door,

raises a violin to chin, and says I'm sorry
to bother you, folks. But please. Just listen.
And it kills me, the word sorry. As if something like music

should be forgiven. He nuzzles into the wood like a lover,
inhales, and at the first slow stroke, the crescendo
seeps through our skin like warm water, we

who have nothing but destinations, who dream of light
but descend into the mouths of tunnels, searching.
Beads of sweat fall from his brow, making dark roses

on the instrument. His head swooning to each chord
exhaled through the hollow torso. The woman beside me
has put down her book, closed her eyes, the baby

has stopped crying, the cop has sat down, and I know
this train is too fast for dreaming, that these iron jaws
will always open to swallow a smile already lost.

How insufficient the memory, to fail before death.
how will hear these notes when the train slides
into the yard, the lights turned out, and the song

lingers with breaths rising from empty seats?
I know I am too human to praise what is fading.
But for now, I just want to listen as the train fills

completely with warm water, and we are all
swimming slowly toward the man with Mozart
flowing from his hands ~ Ocean Vuong

Gamaun is a dainty steed,
Strong, black, and of a noble breed,
Full of fire, and full of bone,
With all his line of fathers known;
Fine his nose, his nostrils thin,
But blown abroad by the pride within;
His mane is like a river flowing,
And his eyes like embers glowing
In the darkness of the night,
And his pace as swift as light. ~ Bryan Procter

To read great books does not mean one becomes 'bookish'; it means that something of the terrible insight of Dostoyevsky, of the richly-charged imagination of Shakespeare, of the luminous wisdom of Goethe, actually passes into the personality of the reader; so that in contact with the chaos of ordinary life certain free and flowing outlines emerge, like the forms of some classic picture, endowing both people and things with a grandeur beyond what is visible to the superficial glance. ~ John Cowper Powys

For me the artworld is like a huge river, which began somewhere in the past and keeps flowing towards the future. ~ Ilya Kabakov

What Walter thinks is that people are like rivers. We never stay in the same place but jest keep flowing along, learning new stuff and picking up new experiences and changing all the time. So today's you isn't the same as yesterday's you and won't be the same as tomorrow's you.
But Walter also thinks that there's a real perfect you that you're always trying to get to, and the better you are at living your life, the closer you come to it. ~ Rebecca Rupp

It is a sort of quasi-monastic diabolical vision. In a landscape populated with larvae - flowing and undulating larvae called forth like a cascade of leeches by tolling bells - three female figures rise up phantasmally, enshrouded with gauze like Spanish madonnas. They are the 'three brides': the bride of Heaven, the bride of the Earth and the bride of Hell...

The bride of Hell, with her two serpents writhing about her temples to hold her veil in place, has the most attractive mask: the most profound eyes, the most vertiginous smile that one could ever see.

If she existed, how I would love that woman! I feel that if that smile and those eyes were in my life they would be all the cure I need!

I could never tire of the study and contemplation of that hallucinatory visage.

"The Three Brides" is very peculiar in its detail and composition. It is the whimsy of a dream rendered with astonishing fastidiousness: the delusion of an opium-smoker composed in the style of Holbein. ~ Jean Lorrain

Father, One day, a woman walked into my life. I hurt her deeply with the harshest words possible. I pushed her away as much as I could. But, she still came back to me. She is so much like me; I look at myself often when I look at her. She has the physical wounds that I have. The tears that fill my brain are flowing through her heart as well. I gave her those wounds. I made her cry. I should not have met her. I should not have allowed her to come into the life of a guy like me. Father, I'm regretting it. This is the first time ... that I have ever regretted anything in my life. ~ Ma-Roo

Facing your fears is key to flowing with Life…Flowing is an important word here: are you flowing with Life or are you fighting it? When you flow with Life, through accepting and living with what is, then miraculously, magically, Life reveals a big secret to you – that fearlessness is not the absence of fear…in fact, it is what fear delivers to you when you turn around and face a situation that is tormenting you, scaring you. What you run away from, will chase you, haunt you…but when you face your fears, the game changes dramatically! You are in control now, not your fears! And when you are in control, while you may not be able to solve every problem immediately, you can deal with the situation calmly, efficiently. This is how you learn to be happy, no matter what you are going through! ~ AVIS Viswanathan

Saeed and Nadia knew what the buildup to conflict felt like, and so the feeling that hung over London was not new to them, and they faced it not with bravery, exactly, and not with panic either, not mostly, but instead with a resignation shot through with moments of tension, with tension ebbing and flowing, and when the tension receded there was calm, the calm that is called the calm before the storm, but is in reality the foundation of a human life, waiting there for us between the steps of our march to our mortality, when we are compelled to pause and not act but be. ~ Mohsin Hamid

On writing, my advice is the same to all. If you want to be a writer, write. Write and write and write. If you stop, start again. Save everything that you write. If you feel blocked, write through it until you feel your creative juices flowing again. Write. Writing is what makes a writer, nothing more and nothing less. - Ignore critics. Critics are a dime a dozen. Anybody can be a critic. Writers are priceless. - Go where the pleasure is in your writing. Go where the pain is. Write the book you would like to read. Write the book you have been trying to find but have not found. But write. And remember, there are no rules for our profession. Ignore rules. Ignore what I say here if it doesn't help you. Do it your own way. - Every writer knows fear and discouragement. Just write. - The world is crying for new writing. It is crying for fresh and original voices and new characters and new stories. If you won't write the classics of tomorrow, well, we will not have any. Good luck. ~ Anne Rice

And now my old dog is dead, and another I had after him, and my parents are dead, and that first world, that old house, is sold and lost, and the books I gathered there lost, or sold- but more books bought, and in another place, board by board and stone by stone, like a house, a true life built, and all because I was steadfast about one or two things: loving foxes, and poems, the blank piece of paper, and my own energy- and mostly the shimmering shoulders of the world that shrug carelessly over the fate of any individual that they may, the better, keep the Niles and Amazons flowing. ~ Mary Oliver

The love of God toward you is like the Amazon River flowing down to water a single daisy. ~ F.B. Meyer

One of the cardinal features of the Buddha's teaching is that all life, however solid it may seem to be, and all things, however separate they may seem to be, are in a state of flux. That is to say that the world we live in doesn't consist so much of things or entities as it consists of process. Everything is in a constant state of flowing pattern. By way of illustration you might say that it's something like the flowing pattern you see when you look at smoke: a dancing, constantly changing arabesque of pattern; flowing, flowing, all the time. Or that the substance of life is something like water, which I can hold in my hand so long as I cup it gently, but if I clutch at the water, I immediately lose it. ~ Alan W. Watts

It was partly the war, the revolution did the rest. The war was an artificial break in life
as if life could be put off for a time
what nonsense! The revolution broke out willy-nilly like a sigh suppressed too long. Everyone was revived, reborn, changed, transformed. You might say that everyone has been through two revolutions
his own, personal revolution as well as the general one. It seems to me that socialism is the sea, and all these separate streams, these private, individual revolutions, are flowing into it
the sea of life, the sea of spontaneity. I said life, but I mean life as you see it in a great picture, transformed by genius, creatively enriched. Only now people have decided to experience it not in books and pictures, but in themselves, not as an abstraction but in practice. ~ Boris Pasternak

The history of the Bible is one of perpetual revolution. In that light, we might begin to think about the Bible not so much as a fixed thing but as a dynamic, vital tradition. In light of its history, the Bible looks less like a rock than a river, continually flowing and changing, widening and narrowing, as it moves downstream.

For some, thinking about the Bible as a river and not a rock is liberating. That rock has been a millstone around the neck and a tombstone that won't be rolled away. But for others, seeing it this way can be disorienting. That rock has promised solid foundation in a stormy world. Cling to it or be swept away. ~ Timothy Beal

Life is not a traffic signal where one who crosses one green light feels lucky and will reach his destination faster. Life has many traffic signals. Marriage is one Traffic signal. If one gets stuck at the red light here, it does not mean that he would lose in life. Instead life is like flowing water. It creates its own path. When one path is blocked it chooses other path. ~ Shiv Kumar

The answer, of course, is that we are always and forever influenced by those with whom we associate. If a man keeps company with those who curse and complain - he will soon find curses and complaints flowing like a river from his own mouth. If he spends his days with the lazy - those seeking handouts - he will soon find his finances in disarray. Many of our sorrows can be traced to relationships with the wrong people. ~ Andy Andrews

So quietly flows the Seine that
one hardly notices its presence. It is always there, quiet and unobtrusive, like a great
artery running through the human body. In the wonderful peace that fell over me
itseemed as if I had climbed to the top of a high mountain; for a little while I would be
able to look around me, to take in the meaning of the landscape.
Human beings make a strange fauna and flora. From a distance they appear
negligible; close up they are apt to appear ugly and malicious. More than anything they
need to be surrounded with sufficient space – space even more than time.
The sun is setting. I feel this river flowing through meits past, its ancient soil, the
changing climate. The hills gently girdle it about: its course is fixed. ~ Henry Miller

I watch her as she leaves. Everything about her is fluid as a river. Her messy hair, her xylophone voice, the strokes of her paintbrush. Even her camouflage army jacket hangs loose, flowing like ribbons. ~ Lisa Ann Sandell

Life without strife is a rose without thorns.
Alive as one is thriving today towards tomorrow,
Nowhere is the past but simply a school of memory.
Dreams, wishes, goals then becomes a wheel of "wills,"
Spirit of a unique being on each soul breathing.
Care to ponder some matter or another?
Awareness sliding towards discovery gliding…
Peace, contentment, fulfillment,
Enwrapped like a mirage enchantment.
Soaring freely, excitingly, happily home-love-bound!


Over precious moments in a breathing of a soul,
Flowing high emotions, feelings, hearts in bliss.


All around any season of one's existence, one asks:
"Anyone out there?
A heart of a soul that didn't harden?
A touch of a soul that didn't hurt?
A life of a soul that didn't love?"


Sands of time, rough, warm, indefinite,
simply spreading, transforming, mounting.
Oasis of a soul from a desert journey,
flourishing with endless beauty and security.
Utmost bliss, fulfillment and contentment,
under covers a struggling, hopeful soul,
Laboring service, living justice,
loving peace and tranquillity passed on to humanity!� ~ Angelica Hopes

When a good change is flowing towards you, don't stand like the river stones before it! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan