Mountain Streams Quotes

Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.

John Muir

Life, Beautiful, Death

John Muir (2015). “A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (With Original Drawings & Photographs): Adventure Memoirs, Travel Sketches & Wilderness Studies”, p.43, e-artnow

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The wise man knows that it is better to sit on the banks of a remote mountain stream than to be emperor of the whole world.

Zhuangzi

Wise, Wisdom, Men

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Do not fail
to learn from
The pure voice of an
Ever-flowing mountain stream
Splashing over the rocks.

Morihei Ueshiba

Rocks, Voice, Mountain

Morihei Ueshiba, John Stevens (2010). “The Art of Peace”, p.37, Shambhala Publications

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It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B. It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.

Cheryl Strayed

Powerful, Philosophy, Sunset

Cheryl Strayed (2012). “Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found”, p.185, Atlantic Books Ltd

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Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity.

John Muir

Beautiful, Death, Children

John Muir (2015). “A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (With Original Drawings & Photographs): Adventure Memoirs, Travel Sketches & Wilderness Studies”, p.43, e-artnow

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Beyond what we wish
and what we fear may happen
we have another life,
as clear and free as a mountain stream.

Rumi

Wish, Mountain, May

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Every day we're given a choice: We can relax and float in the direction that the water flows, or we can swim hard against it. If we go with the river, the energy of a thousand mountain streams will be with us . . . if we resist the river, we will feel rankled and tired as we tread water, stuck in the same place.

Elizabeth Lesser

Tired, Rivers, Water

Elizabeth Lesser (2010). “Broken Open: How difficult times can help us grow”, p.270, Random House

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A genuine passion is like a mountain stream; it admits of no impediment; it cannot go backward; it must go forward.

Christian Nestell Bovee

Passion, Mountain, Genuine

Christian Nestell Bovee (1862). “Intuitions and Summaries of Thought”, p.42

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The reason why rivers and seas are able to be lords over a hundred mountain streams, is that they know how to keep below them. That is why they are able to reign over all the mountain streams.

Laozi

Humility, Sea, Rivers

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Let me drink from the waters where the mountain streams flood Let the smell of wildflowers flow free through my blood Let me sleep in your meadows with the green grassy leaves Let me walk down the highway with my brother in peace Let me die in my footsteps Before I go down under the ground.

Bob Dylan

Brother, Sleep, Journey

Bob Dylan (2014). “The Lyrics: Since 1962”, p.37, Simon and Schuster

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Just let your love flow like a mountain stream
And let your love grow.

Lawrence Eugene Williams

Life, Mountain, Flow

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To the Taoist mentality, the aimless, empty life does not suggest anything depressing. On the contrary, it suggests the freedom of clouds and mountain streams, wandering nowhere, of flowers in impenetrable canyons, beautiful for no one to see, and of the ocean surf forever washing the sand, to no end.

Alan Watts

Beautiful, Depressing, Ocean

Alan Watts (1989). “The way of Zen”, Vintage

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Though I cannot flee from the world of corruption, I can prepare tea with water from a mountain stream and put my heart to rest

Ueda Akinari

Heart, Water, Tea

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Beside the grand history of the glaciers and their own, the mountain streams sing the history of every avalanche or earthquake and of snow, all easily recognized by the human ear, and every word evoked by the falling leaf and drinking deer, beside a thousand other facts so small and spoken by the stream in so low a voice the human ear cannot hear them.

John Muir

Fall, Drinking, Earthquakes

John Muir, Linnie Marsh Wolfe (1979). “John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir”, p.95, Univ of Wisconsin Press

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Haiti itself was also photographed, some of the streets, some of the mountains, rivers, streams, etc. were photographed before talking with me about how I felt about Haiti. Then the camera went to our voodoo temple and saw a serious ceremony, a real ceremony.

Katherine Dunham

Real, Talking, Rivers

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They talk about their Pilgrim blood, their birthright high and holy! a mountain-stream that ends in mud thinks is melancholy.

James Russell Lowell

Thinking, Blood, Mountain

James Russell Lowell (1896). “The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell”

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A little sun, a little rain,
A soft wind blowing from the west,
And woods and fields are sweet again,
And warmth within the mountain's breast

A little love, a little trust,
A soft impulse, a sudden dream,
And life as dry as desert dust,
Is fresher than a mountain stream.

Stopford Brooke

Life, Dream, Sweet

Stopford Augustus Brooke (1889). “Poems”

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Torrent of light and river of air,
Along whose bed the glimmering stars are seen,
Like gold and silver sands in some ravine
Where mountain streams have left their channels bare!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Stars, Science, Rivers

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (2012). “My Complete Poetical Works (Annotated Edition)”, p.844, Jazzybee Verlag

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There would be no chance at all of getting to know death if it happened only once. But fortunately, life is nothing but a continuing dance of birth and death, a dance of change. Every time I hear the rush of a mountain stream, or the waves crashing on the shore, or my own heartbeat, I hear the sound of impermanence. These changes, these small deaths, are our living links with death. They are death's pulses, death's heartbeat, prompting us to let go of all the things we cling to.

Sogyal Rinpoche

Death, Letting Go, Dying

FaceBook post by Sogyal Rinpoche from Jan 19, 2015

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How much is enough? How much does anyone require? Can I be both kind and tough? Can I put faith before desire? Right now, for all time, I vow to try . . . I volunteer to be simple, I volunteer to love, Every living thing like a mountain stream that flows out o'er the land. I volunteer for the journey from here to heaven's gate. I will do my part I place my heart in Your gracious hands . . . How then shall we live? Let us live lightly as a feather. How much shall we give? Let us give everything, together One heart, one mind, all humankind... I volunteer.

Alan AtKisson

Heart, Simple, Journey

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...when the words pour out of you just right, you understand that these sentences are all part of a river flowing out of your own distant, hidden ranges, and all words become the dissolving snow that feeds your mountain streams forever. The language locks itself in the icy slopes of our own high passes, and it is up to us, the writers, to melt the glaciers within us. When these glaciers break off, we get to call them novels, the changelings of our burning spirits, our life's work.

Pat Conroy

Break Off, Rivers, Snow

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To the Technocrats: Have mercy on us. Relax a bit, take time out for simple pleasures. For example, the luxuries of electricity, indoor plumbing, central heating, instant electronic communication and such, have taught me to relearn and enjoy the basic human satisfactions of dipping water from a cold clear mountain stream; of building a wood fire in a cast-iron stove; of using long winter nights for making music, making things, making love; of writing long letters, in longhand with a fountain pen, to the few people on this earth I truly care about.

Edward Abbey

Communication, Writing, Winter

Edward Abbey (2006). “Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast”

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Aomori Water is a sound collage piece made in 1998, in Aomori Japan. I was in a residency with other artists. A Japanese sculptor was making a round house and wanted a sound piece to play in it. I recorded some very gentle waves lapping the beach, for the first part. And a very small mountain stream, flowing, for the second part. I layered 8 tracks. This was the first work that I did in ProTools.

Phill Niblock

Beach, Artist, Japan

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