Quotes about the sea

„The Sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.“

—  Jacques-Yves Cousteau French naval officer, explorer, conservationist, filmmaker, innovator, scientist, photographer, author and researcher 1910 - 1997

„When travel outside the city is desired, computer-guided vehicles for land, sea, air, space and beyond can transport passengers and freight. For rapid movement of passengers on land across via ducts, bridges, and tunnels, high-speed mag-lev trains span great distances and will efficiently replace most aircraft transportation.“

—  Jacque Fresco American futurist and self-described social engineer 1916 - 2017

Designing the Future (2007)

„Eternity is the sun
mixed
with the sea“

—  Arthur Rimbaud French Decadent and Symbolist poet 1854 - 1891

„The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.“

—  Vladimir Nabokov, book The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

Source: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

„I'm a teacher. A teacher is someone who leads. There is no magic here. I do not walk on water. I do not part the sea. I just love children.“

—  Marva Collins American schoolteacher 1936 - 2015

„It had been a long journey. Tien Pao had lost count of all the days and nights. But all those nights when the horns of the new moon had stood dimly in the sky, Tien Pao and his father and mother had pushed the sampan on and on against the currents of the endless rivers. Day and night. There was no stopping even at night. "We won't stop until we drop," Tien Pao's father had kept saying over and over. "And we won't drop until we are far inside this great land of China. Far from the sea-for where the sea is, there the Japanese invaders are."“

—  Meindert DeJong, book The House of Sixty Fathers

The House of Sixty Fathers (1956)

„as small as a world and as large as alone
For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea“

—  E.E. Cummings American poet 1894 - 1962

Variant: For whatever we lose (like a you or a me),
It's always our self we find in the sea.
Source: 100 Selected Poems

„Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backward.“

—  E.E. Cummings American poet 1894 - 1962

Variant: Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backwards.

„The black earth drinks, in turn
The trees drink up the earth.
The sea the torrents drinks, the sun the sea,
And the moon drinks the sun.
Why, comrades, do ye flout me,
If I, too, wish to drink?“

—  Anacreon Greek lyric poet, notable for his drinking songs and hymns -570 - -485 BC

Odes, 21.

„The beauty, the spirit of Germany, its sun, moon, stars, rocks, seas and rivers can never be expressed this way..“

—  Caspar David Friedrich Swedish painter 1774 - 1840

Quote of Friedrich, shortly after his return in 1798; as quoted in C. D. Friedrich by H.W. Grohn; Kindlers Malerei Lexicon, Zurich, 1965, II p. 46; as cited & transl. by Linda Siegel in Caspar David Friedrich and the Age of German Romanticism, Boston Branden Press Publishers, 1978, p. 17
Friedrich's quote is referring to the typical landscape and atmosphere of Denmark, he intensively experienced for four years. In 1798 Friedrich left Copenhagen and returned to Germany, to Dresden
1794 - 1840

„The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides and in its depths it has its pearls too“

—  Vincent Van Gogh, book The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

Source: The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

„It is time, love, to break off that sombre rose,
shut up the stars and bury the ash in the earth;
and, in the rising of the light, wake with those who awoke
or go on in the dream, reaching the other shore of the sea which has no other shore.“

—  Pablo Neruda Chilean poet 1904 - 1973

Es la hora, amor mío, de apartar esta rosa sombría,
cerrar las estrellas, enterrar la ceniza en la tierra:
y, en la insurrección de la luz, despertar con los que despertaron
o seguir en el sueño alcanzando la otra orilla del mar que no tiene otra orilla.
La Barcarola Termina (The Watersong Ends) (1967), trans. Anthony Kerrigan in Selected Poems by Pablo Neruda [Houghton Mifflin, 1990, ISBN 0-395-54418-1] (p. 500).

„A century after the Communist Manifesto was written and thirty years after the Russian Revolution, the revolutionary movement, which has witnessed great victories and suffered profound defeats, seems somehow to have disappeared. Like a river approaching the sea, it has broken up into rivulets, run into swamps and marshes, and finally dried up on the sands.“

—  Cornelius Castoriadis Greek-French philosopher 1922 - 1997

Socialism or Barbarism

„A drop
Melting into the sea,
Everyone can see.
But the sea
Absorped
In a drop —
A rare one
can follow!“

—  Kabir Indian mystic poet 1440 - 1518

Azfar Hussain translations

„The good and eatable fish are separated by the fishers' skill from the bad and poisonous fish, so that the enjoyment of the good should not be spoilt by any of the bad getting into the "vessels" with them. The work of true sobriety is the same; from all pursuits and habits to choose that which is pure and improving, rejecting in every case that which does not seem likely to be useful, and letting it go back into the universal and secular life, called "the sea" (Matthew 13:47-48), in the imagery of the Parable.“

—  Gregory of Nyssa bishop of Nyssa 335 - 395

On Virginity, Chapter 18

„I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea.“

—  Мустафа Кемаль Ататюрк Turkish army officer, revolutionary, and the first President of Turkey 1881 - 1938

He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap. My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will; every man can follow his own conscience, provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him against the liberty of his fellow-men.
Quoted in Atatürk: The Biography of the founder of Modern Turkey, by Andrew Mango; "In a book published in 1928, Grace Ellison quotes [Atatürk], presumably in 1926-27", Grace Ellison Turkey Today (London: Hutchinson, 1928)

„Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
Men were deceivers ever;
One foot in sea, and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.“

—  William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

Balthazar, Act II, scene iii.
Source: Much Ado About Nothing (1598)

„My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.“

—  William Shakespeare, book Romeo and Juliet

Source: Romeo and Juliet

„I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.“

—  Isaac Newton British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern classical physics 1643 - 1727

Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (1855) by Sir David Brewster (Volume II. Ch. 27). Compare: "As children gath'ring pebbles on the shore", John Milton, Paradise Regained, Book iv. Line 330