Rivers need a spring. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals. [ Christopher Marlowe ]

All rivers do what they can for the sea. [ Proverb ]

Ill habits gather by unseen degrees;
As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas. [ Ovid ]

The deepest rivers make least din,
The silent soule doth most abound in care. [ Earl of Stirling ]

Now our fates from unmomentous things
May rise like rivers out of little springs. [ Campbell ]

A little fire is quickly trodden out;
Which, being suffer'd, rivers cannot quench. [ William Shakespeare ]

No trumpet-blast profaned
The hour in which the Prince of Peace was born;
No bloody streamlet stained
Earth's silver rivers on that sacred morn. [ Bryant ]

Rivers cannot fill the sea, that, drinking, thirsteth still. [ Christina Rossetti ]

As birds are made to fly and rivers to run, so the soul to follow duty. [ Ramayana ]

Rivers are roads which travel, and which carry us whither we wish to go. [ Pascal ]

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error. [ Voltaire ]

Many fortunes, like rivers, have a pure source, but grow muddy as they grow large. [ J. Petit-Senn ]

Rivers flow with sweet waters; but, having joined the ocean, they become undrinkable. [ Hitopadesa ]

God strikes not with both hands, for to the sea He made heavens, and to rivers fords. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

Without mountains the air could not be purified, nor the flowing of the rivers sustained. [ Ruskin ]

The first springs of great events, like those of great rivers, are often mean and little. [ Swift ]

More bounteous run rivers when the ice that locked their flow melts into their waters. And when fine natures relent, their kindness is swelled by the thaw. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

Nobility is a river that sets with a constant and undeviating current directly into the great Pacific Ocean of Time; but, unlike all other rivers, it is more grand at its source than at its termination. [ Colton ]

There is a false gravity that is a very ill symptom: and it may be said, that as rivers, which run very slowly, have always the most mud at the bottom: so a solid stiffness in the constant course of a man's life, is a sign of a thick bed of mud at the bottom of his brain. [ Saville ]

Few have borrowed more freely than Gray and Milton; but with a princely prodigality, they have repaid the obscure thoughts of others, with far brighter of their own - like the ocean, which drinks up the muddy water of the rivers from the flood, but replenishes them with the clearest from the shower. [ Colton ]

Truth does not consist in minute accuracy of detail, but in conveying a right impression; and there are vague ways of speaking that are truer than strict facts would be. When the Psalmist said, "Rivers of water run down mine eyes, because men keep not thy law," he did not state the fact but he stated a truth deeper than fact and truer. [ Dean Alford ]

All are to be men of genius in their degree, - rivulets or rivers, it does not matter, so that the souls be clear and pure; not dead walls encompassing dead heaps of things, known and numbered, but running waters in the sweet wilderness of things unnumbered and unknown, conscious only of the living banks, on which they partly refresh and partly reflect the flowers, and so pass on. [ Ruskin ]