Sea Quotes

Love the sea? I dote upon it - from the beach.

The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.

The sea possesses a power over one's moods that has the effect of a will. The sea can hypnotize. Nature in general can do so.

Henrik Ibsen

Roll on thou deep and dark blue ocean - roll! Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain Man marks the earth with ruin - his control Stops with the shore.

Lord Byron

The sea - the truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage hardihood endurance faithfulness - has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.

Joseph Conrad

Being in a ship is being in a jail with the chance of being drowned.

Samuel Johnson

The sea hath no king but God alone.

Anonymous

I liked to sail alone. The sea was the same as a girl to me - I did not want anyone else along.

E B White

I do not love the sea. The look of it is disquieting. There is something in the very sound of it that stirs the premonition felt while we listen to noble music we become inexplicably troubled.

H. M. Tomlinson

The only cure for seasickness is to sit on the shady side of an old church in the country.

Anonymous

I have observed on board a steamer how men and women easily give way to their instinct for flirtation because water has the power of washing away our sense of responsibility and those who on land resemble the oak in their firmness behave like floating seaweed when on the sea.

Rabindranath Tagore

A poor woman from Manchester on being taken to the seaside is said to have expressed her delight on seeing for the first time something of which there was enough for everybody.

John Lubbock

There's never an end for the sea.

Samuel Beckett

He that will learn to pray let him go to sea.

George Edward Herbert

Praise the sea on shore remain.

John Florio

I must go down to the seas again to the lonely sea and the sky And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.

John Masefield

The sea hath no king but God alone.

Christina Rossetti

Break break break On thy cold gray stones O sea! And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me.

Lord Alfred Tennyson

There, at a depth to which divers would find it difficult to descend, are caverns, haunts, and dusky mazes, where monstrous creatures multiply and destroy each other. Huge crabs devour fish and are devoured in their turn. Hideous shapes of living things, not created to be seen by human eyes wander in this twilight. Vague forms of antennae, tentacles, fins, open jaws, scales, and claws, float about there, quivering, growing larger, or decomposing and perishing in the gloom, while horrible swarms of swimming things prowl about seeking their prey.To gaze into the depths of the sea is, in the imagination, like beholding the vast unknown, and from its most terrible point of view. The submarine gulf is analogous to the realm of night and dreams. There also is sleep, unconsciousness, or at least apparent unconsciousness, of creation. There in the awful silence and darkness, the rude first forms of life, phantomlike, demoniacal, pursue their horrible instincts.

Victor Hugo

The sea stood up before him, foaming, torn by lightning bolts, opening terrifying mouths that gobbled up the dense, hard black rains unleashed by the sky like hate.

Jean-François Beauchemin

Maybe you're getting into the rhythm of sailing life," says James. He looks out at the waves that are rolling in to lap against the dock. "You know, the tides going in and then out, the wind blowing east and then west, the high of a perfect day out on the water, the low of a thunderstorm or a wind that won't go your way.

Melissa C. Walker

I find it very difficult to talk here now because I'm watching the sea all the time. The sea always makes me watch it all the time. I've spent hours and hours not just on the sea but just watching wave after wave come in. If it's an image of anything, I think it's an image of our own unconscious, the unconscious of our own minds... or you can put it the other way around, and that is that we have a sea in us. After all, we are sea creatures that learnt to walk on the land, are we not? And perhaps one way or another we go back to it. Every night when we dream we go back into that kind of depths, and that kind of beauty and monstrosity and mystery. So really the sea is not a single image, it can really image almost anything that the human mind can discover.

William Golding

That night, the sea had invaded the land.

Lexie Conyngham

This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak—the sea entering into the life of most men, and the men knowing something or everything about the sea, in the way of amusement, of travel, or of bread-winning.

Joseph Conrad

I’m engaged in the dance of the ages and the search for a song to go with it. Though Templeton’s A Veritable Smorgasbord is a well-deserving classic, it’s a stanza too short for my morphing existence. So I write my own.

Chila Woychik

Am I making myself clear, Orrin? I don't regret how I've lived these past few years. I move where I will. I set no appointments. I guard no borders. What landbound king has the freedom of a ship's captain? The Sea of Brass provides. When I need haste, it gives me winds. When I need gold, it gives me galleons." Thieves prosper, thought Locke. The rich remember. He made his decision, and gripped the rail to avoid shaking."Only gods-damned fools die for lines drawn on maps," said Zamira. "But nobody can draw lines around my ship. If they try, all I need to do to slip away is set more sail.

Scott Lynch

There were some that were of so rare a beauty that my pleasure on catching sight of them was enhanced by surprise. By what privilege, on one morning rather than another, did the window on being uncurtained disclose to my wondering eyes the nymph Glauconome, whose lazy beauty, gently breathing, had the transparence of a vaporous emerald beneath whose surface I could see teeming the ponderable elements that coloured it? She made the sun join in her play, with a smile rendered languorous by an invisible haze which was nought but a space kept vacant about her translucent surface, which, thus curtailed, became more appealing, like those goddesses whom the sculptor carves in relief upon a block of marble, the rest of which he leaves unchiselled. So, in her matchless colour, she invited us out over those rough terrestrial roads, from which, seated beside Mme. de Villeparisis in her barouche, we should see, all day long and without ever reaching it, the coolness of her gentle palpitation.

Marcel Proust

A swaddled silence would be over the island, nights like that: if they complained, or had to cry for some lesion or cramp, it was baffled by the thick mists and all you heard was the tide, slapping ever sideways along the strand, viscous, reverberating; then seltzering back to sea, violently salt, leaving a white skin on the sand it hadn't taken. And only occasionally above the mindless rhythm, from across the narrow strait, over on the great African continent itself, a sound would arise to make the fog colder, the night darker, the Atlantic more menacing: if it were human it could have been called laughter, but it was not human. It was a product of alien secretions, boiling over into blood already choked and heady; causing ganglia to twitch, the field of night-vision to be grayed into shapes that threatened, putting an itch into every fiber, an unbalance, a general sensation of error that could only be nulled by those hideous paroxysms, those fat, spindle-shaped bursts of air up the pharynx, counter-irritating the top of the mouth cavity, filling the nostrils, easing the prickliness under the jaw and down the center-line of the skull: it was the cry of the brown hyena called the strand wolf, who prowled the beach singly or with companions in search of shellfish, dead gulls, anything flesh and unmoving.

Thomas Pynchon

They loved the sea. They taught themselves to sail, to navigate and read the weather. Without their mother's knowledge and long before she thought them old enough to sail outside the harbor, they were piloting their catboat all the way to the Isles of Shoals. They were on the return leg of one such excursion when the fickle weather of early spring took an abrupt turn and the sky darkened and the sun vanished and the wind came squalling off the open sea. They were a half mile from the harbor when the storm overtook them. The rain struck in a slashing torrent and the swells hove them so high they felt they might be sent flying--then dropped them into troughs so deep they could see nothing but walls of water the color of iron. They feared the sail would be ripped away. Samuel Thomas wrestled the tiller and John Roger bailed in a frenzy and both were wide-eyed with euphoric terror as time and again they were nearly capsized before at last making the harbor. When they got home and Mary Margaret saw their sodden state she scolded them for dunces and wondered aloud how they could do so well in their schooling when they didn't have sense enough to get out of the rain.

James Carlos Blake

And yet I have known the sea too long to believe in its respect for decency. An elemental force is ruthlessly frank

Joseph Conrad

Did you know in the sea you can find a fish called, SWEETLIPS?"Ted and Raymond's Sea Adventure

Rhonda Patton

In the beginning was the sea, and the sea was the world

Chika Onyenezi

The world we made together is gone now. Silk and cinnamon do not bring it back to me as clearly as the smell of potatoes frying with onions, or the purr of a cat, or the feel of a knot beneath my fingers. And that in itself is proof of how the voyage changed me, who set out only wanting to see anything new and different.

Susan Palwick

That's what sailing is, a dance, and your partner is the sea. And with the sea you never take liberties. You ask her, you don't tell her. You have to remember always that she's the leader, not you. You and your boat are dancing to her tune.

Michael Morpurgo

i was ok in the seaput me back

Steve Roggenbuck

Hence, in a season of calm weatherThough inland far we be,Our souls have sight of that immortal sea

William Wordsworth

You have to understand the sea, he said, to listen to her, to look out for her moods, to get to know her and respect her and love her. Only then can you build boats that feel at home on the sea.

Michael Morpurgo

For the land, the sea is beautiful; for the sea, the land is beautiful!

Mehmet Murat ildan

The calming sea reaches out to me. Inviting me to its pure serenity."-Elizabeth's Quotes (inspired by a Pablo Neruda quote "I need the sea because it teaches me.")

Elizabeth E. Castillo

For the bored souls, sometimes sea is the best answer!

Mehmet Murat ildan

Why must we climb away to the seal-less parts of the world?

Margo Lanagan

Could any State on Earth Immortall be,Venice by Her rare Goverment is She;Venice Great Neptunes Minion, still a Mayd,Though by the warrlikst Potentats assayed;Yet She retaines Her Virgin-waters pure,Nor any Forren mixtures can endure;Though, Syren-like on Shore and Sea, Her FaceEnchants all those whom once She doth embrace,Nor is ther any can Her bewty prizeBut he who hath beheld her with his Eyes:Those following Leaves display, if well observed,How she long Her Maydenhead preserved,How for sound prudence She still bore the Bell;Whence may be drawn this high-fetchd parallel,Venus and Venice are Great Queens in their degree,Venus is Queen of Love, Venice of Policie.

James Howell

i miss my brother likethe sea would miss saltif that were taken away.

Emma Cameron

Paradise” is a suffering word, grossly overused and ineptly devalued in everyday hype and blurb. Yet, tired as it is, it will have to do. Nothing else conveys that sense of place that can inspire a blissful contentment.

Andrew Rayner

Never seen the sea! How could anyone not have seen the sea? Surely the sea must somehow belong to the happiness of every child.

Iris Murdoch

A pebble thrown in a poolmay ripple from end to end,but tossed into the sea,it is swallowed by enormity.

Craig Froman

(Remember you always have the option of taking to the sea.)

Mallory Ortberg

In a sea of strangers,you've longed to know me.Your life spent sailingto my shores.

Lang Leav

Sometimes the storm winds blow so strong a man has no choice but to furl his sails.

George R.R. Martin

We of the sea come to know each other quickly; our loves, like our hates, are born of sudden dangers.

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

In my mind, I could sense their roots under the soil, creeping in helical tangles of ever-increasing complexity outward and in all directions—out beyond the perimeter of the Helsingør Wood, out below Yami’s Under City, out along the banks of the river, out to the nearest coast and thereupon out into the sea; the roots crept down further along the continental shelf, downward into the abysses, downward into the ocean floor, burrowing under the corals and under trenches, and then back up again to sprout in the darkened forest on a foreign continent: all the trees of the world now had conjoined roots, for they were now of one conjoined consciousness!

Ashim Shanker

The green sea swept into the shallows and seethed there like slaking quicklime. It surged over the rocks, tossing up spangles of water like a juggler and catching them deftly again behind. It raced knee-deep through the clefts and crevices, twisted and tortured in a thousand ways, till it swept nuzzling and sucking into the holes at the base of the cliff. The whole reef was a shambles of foam, but it was bright in the sun, bright as a shattered mirror, exuberant and leaping with light.

Colin Thiele

What was it Isak Dinesen had said about salt as a cure? Tears, sweat, or the sea. She could use a cure.

Nina Post

Many a year I told her tales. And then the time came for me to watch. And watch I have.

Gina Marinello-Sweeney

The sea can do craziness, it can do smooth, it can lie down like silk breathing or toss havoc shoreward; it can give gifts or withhold all; it can rise, ebb, froth like an incoming frenzy of fountains, or it can sweet-talk entirely. As I can too, and so, no doubt, can you, and you.

Mary Oliver

The sea is full of saints. You know that? You know that: you're a big boy. The sea's full of saints and it's been full of saints for years. Since longer than anything. Saints were there before there were even gods. They were waiting for them, and they're still there now.Saints eat fish and shellfish. Some of them catch jellyfish and some of them eat rubbish. Some saints eat anything they can find. They hide under rocks; they turn themselves inside out: they spit up spirals. There's nothing saints don't do. Make this shape with your hands. Like that. Move your fingers. There, you made a saint. Look out, here come another one! Now they're fighting! Yours won.There aren't any big corkscrew saints anymore, but there are still ones like sacks and ones like coils, and ones like robes with flapping sleeves. What's your favourite saint? I'll tell you mine. But wait a minute, first, do you know what it is makes them all saints? They're all a holy family, they're all cousins. Of each other, and of ... you know what else they're cousins of?That's right. Of gods.Alright now. Who was it made you? You know what to say.Who made you?

China Miéville

An aching vacuum inside her sucking the air from her lungs. She hung her head and wept fiercely, the emptiness inside her growing larger not smaller; she felt as though it would grow so large it would suffocate her just as surely as the sea would have

Alan Brennert

As the sun disappeared below the horizon and its glare no longer reflected off a glassy sea, I thought of how beautiful the sunsets always were in the Pacific. They were even more beautiful than over Mobile Bay. Suddenly a thought hit me like a thunderbolt. Would I live to see the sunset tomorrow?

Eugene B. Sledge

The Thames Shouldered its way past Blackfriars Bridge, impatient with the ancient piers, no longer the passive stream that slid past Chelsea Marina, but a rush of ugly water that had scented the open sea and was ready to make a run for it.

J.G. Ballard

A great sea fog is not homogenous--its density varies: it is honeycombed with streets, it has its caves of clear air, its cliffs of solid vapour, all shifting and changing place with the subtlety of legerdemain.

Henry de Vere Stacpoole

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Sea Quotes

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