Seven Quotes About Water

Anyone who waters a garden through a dry August learns a little philosophy along the way. The lines below are short, they come from writers long gone, and each was set down by someone who had thought hard about water.

Benjamin Franklin, 1746

“When the Well’s dry, we know the Worth of Water.” Franklin printed it in Poor Richard’s Almanack, polishing a proverb that Thomas Fuller had collected in his Gnomologia fourteen years earlier as “We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.” Anyone who has watched a rain barrel run empty in a heat wave has met the idea in practice.

Lao Tzu, as translated by James Legge

“There is nothing in the world more soft and weak than water.” The line opens chapter 78 of the Tao Te Ching in Legge’s 1891 translation, which goes on to say that nothing is better at wearing down what is hard and strong. A dripping gutter and a gully cut into a slope prove the point.

Henry David Thoreau, 1854

“A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye.” From the chapter of Walden called “The Ponds,” written beside the pond where Thoreau spent two years growing beans.

W. H. Auden, 1957

“Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.” The closing line of Auden’s poem “First Things First,” and probably the most quoted line ever written about water.

Loren Eiseley, 1957

“If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.” Eiseley, an anthropologist and essayist, wrote it in “The Flow of the River,” an essay in his collection The Immense Journey, after floating down the shallow Platte River in Nebraska.

Albert Szent-Györgyi, 1971

“Water is life’s matter and matrix, mother and medium.” The biochemist who first isolated vitamin C wrote this in a 1971 essay on the biology of water. It reads as poetry, and it is also an accurate description of the chemistry inside every cell.

Leonardo da Vinci

“Water is the driver of nature.” The note comes from the Codex Atlanticus, one of the bound collections of Leonardo’s papers, in the translation of Irma Richter. Leonardo filled pages with studies of eddies, currents and floods, and spent years on canal and river schemes.

The thread running through all seven is plain enough. Water is the one thing every garden, farm and town depends on, and most of the time it arrives so easily that nobody thinks about it. A dry well, a watering ban or a summer without rain tends to change that quickly.