Nile Quotes

• The Nile, forever new and old, Among the living and the dead, Its mighty, mystic stream has rolled.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Forever, Mystic, Streams

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1871). “The Poetical Works”, p.148

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• He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience.

  William Golding

  Patience, Sea, Sailing

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• Egypt is the gift of the Nile.

  Herodotus

  Egypt

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• The fifth century BC historian Herodotus called Egypt ‘the gift of the Nile’. The Egyptians themselves went a lot further. They claimed that their sacred river had its source among the stars.

  Robert Bauval

  Stars, Egypt, Rivers

  Robert Bauval (2007). “The Egypt Code”, p.33, Red Wheel Weiser

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• The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Math, Magnificence, Study

  Charles Caleb Colton (1824). “Lacon, Or, Many Things in a Few Words: Addressed to Those who Think”, p.164

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• She's as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile.

  Richard Brinsley Sheridan

  Clever, Rivals, Headstrong

  The Rivals act 3, sc. 3 (1775)

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• Pitch a lucky man into the Nile, says the Arabian proverb, and he will come up with a fish in his mouth!

  Nathaniel Parker Willis

  Men, Luck, Mouths

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• If you should rear a duck in the heart of the Sahara, no doubt it would swim if you brought it to the Nile.

  Mark Twain

  Heart, Swimming, Ducks

  Mark Twain (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Mark Twain (Illustrated)”, p.143, Delphi Classics

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• I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

  Langston Hughes

  Sleep, Sunset, New Orleans

  "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" l. 1 (1921)

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• That is fine benevolence, finely executed, which, like the Nile, comes from hidden sources.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Source, Fine, Benevolence

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• Today the traveller on the Nile enters a wonderland at whose gates rise the colossal pyramids of which he has had visions perhaps from earliest childhood.

  James Henry Breasted

  Pyramids, Childhood, Vision

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• The Nile, draining out into the Mediterranean. The bright lights of Cairo announce the opening of the north-flowing river’s delta, with Jerusalem’s answering high beams to the northeast. This 4,258 mile braid of human life, first navigated end-to-end in 2004, is visible in a single glance from space.

  Chris Hadfield

  Light, Rivers, Space

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• You are my country, Desdemona. ... My Egypt. My hot, harrowing desert and my cool, verdant Nile, infinitely lovely and unfathomable and sustaining.

  Connie Brockway

  Country, Egypt, Romance

  Connie Brockway (2010). “As You Desire: A Loveswept Classic Romance”, p.117, Loveswept

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• God took the beauty of the Bay of Naples, the Valley of the Nile, the Swiss Alps, the Hudson River Valley, rolled them into one and made San Francisco Bay.

  Fiorello H. La Guardia

  Rivers, San Francisco, Hudson River

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• But there have been human hearts, constituted just like ours, for six thousand years. The same stars rise and set upon this globe that rose upon the plains of Shinar or along the Egyptian Nile and the same sorrows rise and set in every age.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Stars, Heart, Past

  Henry Ward Beecher (1858). “Life Thoughts”, p.9

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• The expedition had now performed its functions. I saw that old father Nile without any doubt rises in the Victoria Nyanza, and as I had foretold, that lake is the great source of the holy river which cradled the first expounder of our religious belief.

  John Hanning Speke

  Religious, Father, Rivers

  1863 Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile.

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• A day will come when the European god of the nineteenth century will be classed with the gods of Olympus and the Nile.

  William Winwood Reade

  God, Olympus, Century

  William Winwood Reade (1874). “The Martyrdom of Man”, p.537

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• Egypt! from whose all dateless tombs arose Forgotten Pharaohs from their long repose, And shook within their pyramids to hear A new Cambyses thundering in their ear; While the dark shades of forty ages stood Like startled giants by Nile's famous flood.

  Lord Byron

  Dark, Egypt, Pyramids

  Lord Byron (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Lord Byron (Illustrated)”, p.724, Delphi Classics

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• A good friend of mine told me you should take a break and you should go see the world. Go somewhere. That is when I chose to go to Egypt, and so I took this beautiful trip to Egypt. It was the first time ever in my whole life I took three weeks off, and I sailed down the Nile and I saw the tombs and the temples, and I experienced a place that was so magical and so incredibly powerful and intelligent and inspiring.

  Alicia Keys

  Beautiful, Powerful, Good Friend

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• How doth the little crocodile Improve his shining tail, And pour the waters of the Nile On every golden scale! How cheerfully he seems to grin, How neatly he spreads his claws, And welcomes little fishes in, With gently smiling jaws!

  Lewis Carroll

  Water, Shining, Tails

  Alice's Adventures inWonderland ch. 2 (1865)

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• The Nile Project is the performing side of an effort that also includes education in music and environmental issues, raising awareness of the entire Nile basin as an ecosystem. With such vibrant music, the good intentions were a bonus; the Nile Project was a superb example of what I call small-world music, of what happens to traditions in the information age.

  Jon Pareles

  Issues, Ecosystems, Effort

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• As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Life, Dog, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (1882). “Walden”, p.93

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• O'er Egypt's land of memory floods are level, And they are thine, O Nile! and well thou knowest The soul-sustaining airs and blasts of evil, And fruits, and poisons spring where'er thou flowest.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Memories, Spring, Air

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Geoffrey Matthews, Kelvin Everest (1989). “The Poems of Shelley: 1817-1819”, p.350, Pearson Education

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• England may as well dam up the waters of the Nile with bulrushes as to fetter the step of Freedom, more proud and firm in this youthful land than where she treads the sequestered glens of Scotland, or couches herself among the magnificent mountains of Switzerland.

  Lydia M. Child

  Freedom, Land, Water

  "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations", 10th edition, 1919.

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• As no man can say who it was that first invented the use of clothes and houses against the inclemency of the weather, so also can no investigator point out the origin of Medicine - mysterious as the source of the Nile.

  Thomas Sydenham

  Men, Weather, Medicine

  Thomas Sydenham, Robert Gordon Latham (1848). “The Works of Thomas Sydenham, M.D.”, p.11

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