Nile Quotes

Egypt is the gift of the Nile.

Rain plays no part in the agricultural life of Egypt. It seldom rains. Irrigation from the Nile was thus introduced at an early date. The summer supply of water in that river is insufficient for the adequate irrigation of the cultivated lands at present dependent on it. Egypt is a growing country. The increase in population today is at the rate of 200,000 souls per annum. Egypt is exclusively an agricultural country. There is, therefore, an insistent demand for expansion of cultivation into new areas now lying fallow for want of water. Further control of the river is accordingly now urgently required.

Plant the Ethiopian flag and make the inhabitants submit in all the country as far as the White Nile.

Eventually, when I started studying Egyptology, I realized that seeing with my naked eyes alone wasn't enough. Because all of the sudden, in Egypt, my beach had grown from a tiny beach in Maine to one eight hundred miles long, next to the Nile.

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.

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

When I was a boy in Desuq, Egypt, a city on the Rosetta branch of the Nile, about 50 miles east of Alexandria, my family lived steps away from the local landmark, a mosque named for a 13th-century Sufi sheik.

The present map of Palestine was drawn by the British mandate. The Jewish people have another map which our youth and adults should strive to fulfill: from the Nile to the Euphrates.

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.

England may as well dam up the waters of the Nile with bulrushes as to fetter the step of Freedom

… twice as big as Germany and France together. The worst forms of misgovernment existed over this vast tract of country.... The rich soil on the banks of the [Nile] river, which had a few years since been highly cultivated, was abandoned. There was not a dog to howl for a lost master. Industry had vanished; oppression had driven the inhabitants from the soil.... The entire country was leased out to piratical slave-hunters and traders, under the name of traders, by the Khartoum Government. It was against the “Christian” morals of most English to capture and enslave residents of African villages. However, if the Blacks were already enslaved, most had little compunction to buying slaves, and reselling them in the Carribean or America. Almost all the Aftical slaves were originally captured and enslaved by Arab Slave Traders who could not enslave fellow Moslems but could do so for animists. The Englsh in control of the Sudan would look with askance at the “primitive” and “immoral” Arab slave traders, but would make money by the enslavement process by licencing Slave traders in the Sudan and of course charging a high fee.]

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

The Musketaquid, or Grass-ground River, though probably as old as the Nile or Euphrates, did not begin to have a place in civilized history until the fame of its grassy meadows and fish attracted settlers out of England in 1635, when it received the other but kindred name of CONCORD from the first plantation on its banks, which appears to have commenced in a spirit of peace and harmony. It will be Grass-ground River as long as grass grows and water runs here; it will be Concord River only while men lead peacable lives on its banks.

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.