These Mississippi River quotes will inspire you. The Mississippi River is the second-longest river and chief river of the second-largest drainage system on the North American continent, second only to the Hudson Bay drainage system.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging Mississippi River quotes, Mississippi River sayings, and Mississippi River proverbs.
Famous Mississippi River Quotes
- “The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise.” ~ Mark Twain
- “I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.” ~ Maya Angelou
- “As founder and co-chair of the upper Mississippi River Congressional task force, I have long sought to preserve the river’s health and historical multiple uses, including as a natural waterway and a home to wildlife, for the benefit of future generations of Americans.” ~ Ron Kind
- “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.” ~ Mark Twain
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“Finally, the ecological health of the Mississippi River and its economic importance to the many people that make their living or seek their recreation is based on a healthy river system.” ~ Ron Kind
- “In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. Therefore, in the Old Silurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long, seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.” ~ Mark Twain
- “All the really great records or people who made them somehow came from Memphis or Louisiana or somewhere along the Mississippi River…And singers like Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters gave me the feeling that they were right there, standing by the river.” ~ John Fogerty
- “The Mississippi River carries the mud of thirty states and two provinces 2,000 miles south to the delta and deposits 500 million tons of it there every year. The business of the Mississippi, which it will accomplish in time, is methodically to transport all of Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico.” ~ Charles Kuralt
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“The Mississippi, the Ganges, and the Nile,… the Rocky Mountains, the Himmaleh, and Mountains of the Moon, have a kind of personal importance in the annals of the world.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “The Mississippi River towns are comely, clean, well built, and pleasing to the eye, and cheering to the spirit. The Mississippi Valley is as reposeful as a dreamland, nothing worldly about it . . . nothing to hang a fret or a worry upon.” ~ Mark Twain
- “You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.” ~ Mark Twain
- “Grief is just so scary…. If we finally begin to cry all those suppressed tears, they will surely wash us away like the Mississippi River. That’s what our parents told us. We got sent to our rooms for having huge feelings. In my family, if you cried or got angry, you didn’t get dinner.” ~ Anne Lamott
- “Egyptian pyramids or obelisks – seemed to be the basis of the great memorials that have kept their significance and dignity across time. Neither an obelisk nor a rectangular box nor a dome seemed right on this site or for this purpose. But here, at the edge of the Mississippi River, a great arch did seem right.” ~ Eero Saarinen
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“It’s a treat to beat your feet on the Mississippi mud.” ~ James Kavanaugh
- “Egyptian pyramids or obelisks – seemed to be the basis of the great memorials that have kept their significance and dignity across time. Neither an obelisk nor a rectangular box nor a dome seemed right on this site or for this purpose. But here, at the edge of the Mississippi River, a great arch did seem right.” ~ Eero Saarinen
- “To secure the safety of the navigation of the Mississippi River I would slay millions. On that point I am not only insane, but mad… I think I see one or two quick blows that will astonish the natives of the South and will convince them that, though to stand behind a big cottonwood and shoot at a passing boat is good sport and safe, it may still reach and kill their friends and families hundreds of miles off. For every bullet shot at a steamboat, I would shoot a thousand 30-pounder Parrots into even helpless towns on Red, Ouachita, Yazoo, or wherever a boat can float or soldier march.” ~ William Tecumseh Sherman
- “What would we say if the Chinese sent a gunboat with their marines up the Mississippi River claiming they were protecting their laundries in Memphis?” ~ Will Rogers
- “I love being so tight on people in close-ups that the veins in their eyes look like the Mississippi River.” ~ Sylvester Stallone
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“My home office and workshop are on an overlook on the only deep river gorge on the entire length of the Mississippi River.” ~ William Gurstelle
- “My home office and workshop are on an overlook on the only deep river gorge on the entire length of the Mississippi River.” ~ William Gurstelle
- “[For American consumer society], the country’s reserves of ignorance constitute a natural resource as precious as the Mississippi River or the long-lost herds of buffalo.” ~ Lewis H. Lapham
- “My favorite figure of the American author is that of a man who breeds a favorite dog, which he throws into the Mississippi River for the pleasure of making a splash. The river does not splash, but it drowns the dog.” ~ Henry Adams
- “The living do not see eternity, just as they don’t see Everlost, but they sense both in ways that they don’t even know. They don’t feel the Everlost barrier set across the Mississippi River, and yet no one had ever dared to draw city boundaries that straddle both sides of its waters. The living do not see Afterlights, and yet everyone has had times when they’ve felt a presence near them – sometimes comforting, sometimes not – but always strong enough to make one turn around and look over one’s shoulder.” ~ Neal Shusterman
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“I lived in a small city on the Mississippi River across from Iowa, so I didn’t have a country upbringing, but in high school we would go drink kegs in cornfields.” ~ Lissie
- “Clearly we’re in historic times here. We have – one of the tributaries of the Mississippi River is a river called the Merrimack. And the crest areas there – they’re going to be a number of feet, 2, 3, 4, over what they were in ’93 or ’82. And on the Mississippi River itself, down below St. Louis, we’re still projecting a couple of feet over that historic number. So the bottom line is there’s a significant amount of water that’s causing evacuations and challenges throughout that whole area.” ~ Jay Nixon
- “Most of the locks and dams on the upper Mississippi River system are over 60 years old and many are in serious need of repair and rehabilitation.” ~ Ron Kind
