This was a merchant who sold pills that had been invented to quench thirst. "You need only swallow one pill a week, and you would feel no need of anything to drink."

“What makes the desert beautiful,” said the little prince, “is that somewhere it hides a well.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Only in quiet waters do things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world.
Hans Margolius

No one can see their reflection in running water. It is only in still water that we can see.
Taoist proverb

In order to reflect, think and plan, you must quiet yourself. You can’t see your reflection in churning waters. Water must be still to see your reflection.
Karen Susman, The Remarkable Networking Toolbox

The water in a vessel is sparkling; the water in the sea is dark. The small truth has words which are clear; the great truth has great silence.
Rabindranath Tagore

Every where water is a thing of beauty, gleaming in the dewdrops; singing in the summer rain; shining in the ice-gems till the leaves all seem to turn to living jewels; spreading a golden veil over the setting sun; or a white gauze around the midnight moon.
John Ballantine Gough, A Glass of Water

Have you watched the fairies when the rain is done,
Spreading out their little wings to dry them in the sun?
Rose Fyleman

Our bodies are molded rivers.
Novalis

Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.
Wallace Stevens

Ever wonder about those people who spend $2 apiece on those little bottles of Evian water? Try spelling Evian backward.
Unknown, but often incorrectly attributed to George Carlin

Bottled water costs about 2000 times more than tap water. Can you imagine paying 2000 times the price of anything else? How about a $ 10,000 sandwich?
Annie Leonard

Enough. Man is capable of reform once presented with the facts, and the fact is that bottling water and shipping it is a big waste of fuel, so stop already.
Garrison Keillor

I have always been a big advocate of tap water—not because I think it harmless but because the idea of purchasing water extracted from some remote watershed and then hauled halfway round the world bothers me. Drinking bottled water relieves people of their concern about ecological threats to the river they live by or to the basins of groundwater they live over. It's the same kind of thinking that leads some to the complacent conclusion that if things on earth get bad enough, well, we'll just blast off to a space station somewhere else.
Sandra Steingraber, Having Faith, 2001

Water sustains all.
Thales of Miletus, 600 B.C.

The wise man of Miletus thus declared the first of things is water.
J. S. Blackie, 1877

Water is the best of all things.
Pindar, Olympian Odes

A man of wisdom delights in water.
Confucius, Analects

In every glass of water we drink, some of the water has already passed through fishes, trees, bacteria, worms in the soil, and many other organisms, including people.
Elliot A. Norse, Animal Extinctions

I don’t drink water, because if water can erode rock, think what it can do to flesh.
Jarod Kintz

We call upon the waters that rim the earth, horizon to horizon, that flow in our rivers and streams, that fall upon our gardens and fields, and we ask that they teach us and show us the way.
Native American, Chinook Blessing Litany

Rivers are roads which move, and which carry us whither we desire to go.
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

Gutta cavat lapidem (Dripping water hollows out a stone)
Ovid, Epistulae Ex Ponto, Book 3, no. 10, 1. 5

The drops of rain make a hole in the stone, not by violence, but by oft falling.
Lucretius

Rain! whose soft architectural hands have power to cut stones, and chisel to shapes of grandeur the very mountains.
Henry Ward Beecher

My mother once told me I was like water. Water can carve its way even through stone. And when trapped, water makes a new path.
Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.
Henry David Thoreau

Nothing in the world is more flexible and yielding than water. Yet when it attacks the firm and the strong, none can withstand it, because they have no way to change it. So the flexible overcome the adamant, the yielding overcome the forceful. Everyone knows this, but no one can do it.” Water flows humbly to the lowest level.
Lao-Tzu, Chinese philosopher (6th century B.C.)

Nothing is weaker than water,
Yet for overcoming what is hard and strong,
Nothing surpasses it.
Lao-Tzu

Water is the most versatile of all elements. It isn't afraid to burn in fire or fade into the sky, it doesn't hesitate to shatter against sharp rocks in rainfall or drown into the dark shroud of the earth. It exists beyond all beginnings and ends. On the surface nothing will shift, but deep in underground silence, water will hide and with soft fingers coax a new channel for itself, until stone gives in and slowly settles around the secret space. Death is water's close companion, and neither of them can be separated from us, for we are made of the versatility of water and the closeness of death. Water doesn't belong to us, be we belong to water: when it has passed through our fingers and pores and bodies, nothing separates us from earth.
Emmi Itäranta, Memory of Water

Water is the driver of Nature.
Leonardo da Vinci

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 da Vinci

In time and with water, everything changes.
Leonardo da Vinci

The water which rises in the mountain is the blood which keeps the mountain in life.
Leonardo da Vinci

The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl.
Dave Barry

Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer.
Dave Barry

...all the charming and beautiful things, from the Song of Songs, to bouillabaisse, and from the nine Beethoven symphonies to the Martini cocktail, have been given to humanity by men who, when the hour came, turned from tap water to something with color in it, and more in it than mere oxygen and hydrogen.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)

Come boy, and pour for me a cup
Of old Falernian. Fill it up
With wine, strong, sparkling, bright, and clear;
Our host decrees no water here.
Let dullards drink the Nymph's pale brew,
The sluggish thin their blood with dew.
For such pale stuff we have no use;
For us the purple grape's rich juice.
Begone, ye chilling water sprite;
Here burning Bacchus rules tonight!
Catullus, Selections From Catullus

No poems can live long or please that are written by water-drinkers.
Horace, Roman lyric poet (65 -8 B.C.)

The foolish are like ripples on water, For whatsoever they do is quickly effaced; But the righteous are like carvings upon stone, For their smallest act is durable.
Horace

Before Noah, men having only water to drink, could not find the truth. Accordingly...they became abominably wicked, and they were justly exterminated by the water they loved to drink. This good man, Noah, having seen that all his contemporaries had perished by this unpleasant drink, took a dislike to it; and God, to relieve his dryness, created the vine and revealed to him the art of making le vin. By the aid of this liquid he unveiled more and more truth.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

Take counsel in wine, but resolve afterwards in water.
Benjamin Franklin

When the well is dry, we learn the worth of water.
Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanac (1746?)

We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.
Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732

When you're thirsty, it's too late to think about digging a well.
Japanese Proverb

You don't miss your water until your well runs dry.
an old country proverb

I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man.
Henry David Thoreau

A man may acquire a taste for wine or brandy, and so lose his love for water, but should we not pity him.
Henry David Thoreau

The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water, - so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be.
Henry David Thoreau

A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, "The Ponds" (1854)

Life in us is like the water in a river.
Henry David Thoreau

Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody.
Mark Twain

Whenever someone asks me if I want water with my Scotch, I say I'm thirsty, not dirty.
Joe E. Lewis

I never drink water. I'm afraid it will become habit-forming.
W. C. Fields (1880-1946)

Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.
W. C. Fields

Once... in the wilds of Afghanistan, I lost my corkscrew, and we were forced to live on nothing but food and water for days.
W. C. Fields, My Little Chickadee.

I never drink water; that is the stuff that rusts pipes.
W. C. Fields

I never drink water because of the disgusting things that fish do in it.
W. C. Fields

You can't trust water: Even a straight stick turns crooked in it.
W. C. Fields

It ain't no use to grumble and complain;
It's jest as cheap and easy to rejoice;
When God sorts out the weather and sends rain,
Why, rain's my choice.
James Whitcomb Riley, Rain, 1849 – 1916

For after all the best thing one can do when
it is raining, is to let it rain.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

How beautiful is the rain! After the dust and the heat, In the broad and fiery street, In the narrow lane, How beautiful is the rain!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Rain in Summer

Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
John Updike, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, 1989

The good rain, like the bad preacher, does not know when to leave off.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby.
Langston Hughes, April Rain Song

I am sure it is a great mistake always to know enough to go in when it rains. One may keep snug and dry by such knowledge, but one misses a world of loveliness.
Adeline Knapp

To get clear water, one must go to the source.
French Proverb

Dirty water will quench few.
French 16th Century Proverb

There is no small pleasure in sweet water. [Lat., Est in aqua dulci non invidiosa voluptas.]
Author: Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)

We are a water-drinking people, and we are allowing every brook to be defiled.
George Bird Grinnell, Outdoor America, February 1925

If you saw what the river carried, you would never drink the water.
Jamaican Proverb

He who drinks a tumbler of London water has literally in his stomach more animated beings than there are men, women, and children on the face of the globe.
Syndney Smith, Letter to Countess Grey, November 19, 1834

Filthy water cannot be washed.
African proverb

In order for something to become clean, something else must become dirty.
Imbesi's Conservation of Filth Law

Til taught by pain, men really know not what good water is worth.
From "Don Juan" by Byronn

The sewer is the conscience of the city.
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, 1862

The trouble with water—and there is trouble with water—is that they're not making any more of it. They're not making any less, mind, but no more either. There is the same amount of water in the planet now as there was in prehistoric times. People, however, they're making more of—many more, far more than is ecologically sensible—and all those people are utterly dependent on water for their lives (humans consist mostly of water), for their livelihoods, their food, and increasingly, their industry. Humans can live for a month without food but will die in less than a week without water. Humans consume water, discard it, poison it, waste it, and restlessly change the hydrological cycles, indifferent to the consequences: too many people, too little water, water in the wrong places and in the wrong amounts.
Marq de Villiers, Water, 2000

You can't just make more water. You've got to learn to live with what you've got, work with what you've got. And if your lifestyle is using more water than what you have the capability of getting your hands on, something's got to change.
Dave Sharp (alfalfa farmer in the Wellton-Mohawk Valley near Yuma, AZ, 2014 NPR interview)

Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.
Jacques Cousteau

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

A man from the west will fight over three things: water, women and gold, and usually in that order.
Senator Barry Goldwater, AZ

In the Western United States, water flows uphill to money.
Glen Sanders

Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.
Unknown (widely attributed to Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain), but this is under dispute)

The solution to our water problems is more rain.
Attributed to Mark Twain

I suppose that, after the passion of love, water rights have caused more trouble than anything else to the human species.
Alice Steinbach, Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman

Here was a thing which had not changed; a score of years had not affected the water’s mulatto complexion in the least; a score of centuries would succeed no better, perhaps. It comes out of the turbulent, bank-carving Missouri, and every tumblerful of it hold nearly an acre of land in solution. I got this fact from the bishop of the diocese. If you will let your glass stand half an hour, you can separate the land from the water as easy as Genesis; and you will find them both good: the one is good to eat, the other is good to drink. The land is very nourishing, the water is thoroughly wholesome. The one appeases hunger; the other thirst. But the natives do not take them separately, but together, as nature mixed them. When they find an inch of mud in the bottom of the glass, they stir it up and then take the draught as they would gruel. It is difficult for a stranger to get used to this batter, but once used to it, he will prefer it to water. This is really the case. It is good for steamboating, and good to drink; but it is worthless for all other purposes, except baptizing.
Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain), Life on the Mississippipi

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.
Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain)

My books are water; those of great geniuses are wine. Everybody drinks water.
Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain)

We must also consider the qualities of the waters, for as they differ from one another in taste and weight, so also do they differ much in their qualities.  ...And I wish to give an account of the other kinds of waters, namely, of such as are wholesome and such as are unwholesome, and what bad and what good effects may be derived from water; for water contributes much towards health.

I will now tell how it is with respect to rain-water, and water from snow. Rain waters, then, are the lightest, the sweetest, the thinnest, and the clearest; for originally the sun raises and attracts the thinnest and lightest part of the water, as is obvious from the nature of salts; for the saltish part is left behind owing to its thickness and weight, and forms salts; but the sun attracts the thinnest part, owing to its lightness, and he abstracts this not only from the lakes, but also from the sea, and from all things which contain humidity, and there is humidity in everything; and from man himself the sun draws off the thinnest and lightest part of the juices.
Hippocrates, On Airs, Waters, and Places (400 B.C.E

Water is sometimes sharp and sometimes strong, sometimes acid and sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet and sometimes thick or thin, sometimes it is seen bringing hurt or pestilence, sometime health-giving, sometimes poisonous. It suffers change into as many natures as are the different places through which it passes. And as the mirror changes with the colour of its subject, so it alters with the nature of the place, becoming noisome, laxative, astringent, sulfurous, salty, incarnadined, mournful, raging, angry, red, yellow, green, black, blue, greasy, fat or slim. Sometimes it starts a conflagration, sometimes it extinguishes one; is warm and is cold, carries away or sets down, hollows out or builds up, tears or establishes, fills or empties, raises itself or burrows down, speeds or is still; is the cause at times of life or death, or increase or privation, nourishes at times and at others does the contrary; at times has a tang, at times is without savor, sometimes submerging the valleys with great floods. In time and with water, everything changes.
Leonardo da Vinci

1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness [was] upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4. And God saw the light, that [it was] good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
6. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
7. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which [were] under the firmament from the waters which [were] above the firmament: and it was so.
8. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
9. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry [land] appear: and it was so.
10. And God called the dry [land] Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that [it was] good...
20. ...And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl [that] may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
21. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that [it was] good.
22. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
23. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
Genesis, Chapter 1, King James translation of the Bible

1. The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
2. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
Psalm 23, King James translation of the Bible

10. He sendeth the springs into the valleys, which run among the hills.
11. They give drink to every beast of the field: the wild asses quench their thirst.
12. By them shall the fowls of the heaven have their habitation, which sing among the branches.
13. He watereth the hills from his chambers: the earth is satisfied with the fruit of thy works.
Psalm 104, King James translation of the Bible

23. Be glad then, ye children of Zion, and rejoice in the LORD your God: for he hath given you the former rain moderately, and he will cause to come down for you the rain, the former rain, and the latter rain in the first month.
24. And the floors shall be full of wheat, and the vats shall overflow with wine and oil.
Joel, Chapter 2, King James translation of the Bible

27. For he maketh small the drops of water: they pour down rain according to the vapour thereof:
28. Which the clouds do drop and distil upon man abundantly.
Job Chapter 36, King James translation of the Bible

A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.
Carl Reiner

Snow is just time-release water.
resident of Granby Colorado

Like water, we are truest to our nature in repose.
Cyril Connolly

The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.
Isak Dinesen

You see through love, and that deludes your sight, As what is straight seems crooked through the water.
John Dryden

A straight oar looks bent in the water. What matters is not merely that we see things but how we see them.
Michel de Montaigne

And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters.
Henry Wordsworth, "Resolution and Independence

And gentle winds and waters near, make music to the lonely ear.
Byron,"Parisina"

It is life, I think, to watch the water. A man can learn so many things.
Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook

Just Add Water

The words on labels tell this tale,
In recipes, in ads by mail,
And chances are, at work or play,
You'll see these famous words today
 - Just add water.

You'd be surprised how many things
Are dry and useless till one brings
The magic liquid known to all;
You use it when you heed the call
 - Just add water.

To illustrate and prove this thought,
Remember all the food you've bought
On which was printed, clear and bright,
Instructions that make cooking light
 - Just add water.

You now can buy
Dried fruits, or soups, or tasty cakes;
To powdered milk and frozen juices,
To products with a thousand uses,
Just add water.

Imagine for a minute, please,
An arid wasteland, bare of trees;
This could be farmland, rich and good
And quite productive if we could
Just add water.

What turns cement into concrete?
What changes seed to golden wheat?
No other words now known to man
Can answer that: but these words can:
Just add water.

David J. Ford

In one drop of water are found all the secrets of all the oceans; in one aspect of You are found all the aspects of existence.
Khalil Gibran

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 rocks 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. I am haunted by waters.
Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It

A chemist's view of the world is not as narrow as one might think! Yes, we start with the atom, and then go on to the rules governing the kinds of structural units that can be made from them. We are taught early on to predict the properties of bulk matter from these geometric arrangements.

And then we come to H₂O, and are shocked to find that many of these predictions are way off, and that water (and by implication, life itself) should not even exist on our planet! But we soon learn that this tiny combination of three nuclei and ten electrons possesses special properties that make it unique among the more than 15 million chemical species we presently know. When we stop to ponder the consequences of this, chemistry moves from being an arcane science to a voyage of wonder and pleasure as we learn to relate the microscopic world of the atom to the greater world in which we all live.
Stephen Lower - A gentle introduction to water and its structure

Be formless, be shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend.
Bruce Lee

Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way round or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.
Bruce Lee

I don't want to get technical, but according to chemistry alcohol is a solution!

I don't want to get technical, but according to chemistry, water and alcohol make a solution!