Quotes about the sea
page 14

“Which serves for cynosure
To all that sail upon the sea obscure.”

Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas (1544–1590) French writer

First Week, Seventh Day.
La Semaine; ou, Création du monde (1578)

“DOBSON: Well, I do. It depends on what you mean by that. I feel very strongly about Israel. You know it is surrounded by its enemies. And it exists primarily because God has willed it to exist, I think, according to scripture, but also, because America has stood with Israel. If we ever abandon it, it's gone. There are six million Jews in Israel. There are 400 million Muslims around them that hate them and want many of them -- hate them and want to drive them into the sea. And that is a major concern to me. It's the only democracy in the Middle East. Why wouldn't we support them?”

James Dobson (1936) Evangelical Christian psychologist, author, and radio broadcaster.

2002

God, Hate, Feeling, Democracy

“Ah, County Guy, the hour is nigh,
The sun has left the lea.
The orange flower perfumes the bower,
The breeze is on the sea.”

Walter Scott book Quentin Durward

Quentin Durward, Chap. iv.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Guy, Flowers, Sun

“To this day I don't know why they voted for me. I'm hoping that it was because I chose a talent that made them sit up. I played a 70-year-old Irish mother lamenting the loss of her last son to the sea. I took off all my makeup, wore a shawl and my father's black socks — the costume I had worn when I'd done the play when I was in high school. It was the only thing I knew to do. I'm an actress, that's what I wanted to be.”

Lee Meriwether (1935) American actress, former model

School, Hope, Loss

“Language, intelligence, and humor, along with art, generosity, and musical ability, are often described as human equivalents of the peacock’s tail. However, peacocks afford a poor analogy for the role of courtship displays in humans. Other animal models offer a better fit. In a number of nonhuman species — species as diverse as sea dragons and grebes — males and females engage in a mutual courtship “dance,” in which the two partners mirror one another’s movements. In Clark’s grebes and Western grebes, for instance, the pair bond ritual culminates in the famous courtship rush: The male and female swim side by side along the top of the water, with their wings back and their heads and necks in a stereotyped posture. If we want a nonhuman analogue for the role of creative intelligence or humor in human courtship, we should think not of ornamented peacocks displaying while drab females evaluate them. We should think instead of grebes engaged in their mating rush or sea dragons engaged in their synchronized mirror dance. Once we have one of these alternative images fixed in our minds, we can then add the proviso that there is a slight skew such that, in the early stages of courtship, men tend to display more vigorously and women tend to be choosier. However, this should be seen as a qualification to the primary message that intelligence, humor, and other forms of sexual display are part of the mutual courtship process in our species.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), p. 160

Women, Men, Art, Music

“The gray silence, the gray waves, the gray wastes of the sea.”

William Sharp (writer) (1855–1905) Scottish writer

Longing, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Silence

“Muslim ‘community’ in India had remained sharply divided into two mutually exclusive segments throughout the centuries of Islamic invasions and rule over large parts of the country. On the one hand, there were the descendants of conquerors who came from outside or who identified themselves completely with the conquerors - the Arabs, the Turks, the Iranians, and the Afghans. They glorified themselves as the Ashrãf (high-born, noble) or Ahli-i-Daulat (ruling race) and Ahl-i-Sa‘adat (custodians of religion). On the other hand, there were converts from among the helpless Hindus who were looked down upon by the Ashrãf and described as the Ajlãf (low-born, ignoble) and Arzãl (mean, despicable) depending upon the Hindu castes from which the converts came. The converts were treated as Ahl-i-Murãd (servile people) who were expected to obey the Ahl-i-Daulat and Ahl-i-Sa‘adat abjectly. Shah Waliullah (1703-62) and his son Abdul Aziz (1746-1822) were the first to notice this situation and felt frightened that the comparatively small class of the Ashrãf was most likely to be drowned in the surrounding sea of Hindu Kafirs. … They had to turn to the neo-Muslims. The neo-Muslims, however, had little interest in waging wars for Islam. They had, therefore, to be fully Islamized, that is, alienated completely from their ancestral society and culture. That is why the Tabligh movement was started.”

Shah Waliullah Dehlawi (1703–1762) Indian muslim scholar

Goel, Sita Ram (1995). Muslim separatism: Causes and consequences. ISBN 9788185990262

War, People, Religion, Communication

“The end of the philosophical dialogue lies in itself; it can never serve a purpose outside of itself. Just as a sculptor does not cease to be a work of art even if it lies at the bottom of the sea, so indeed every work of philosophy endures, even if uncomprehended in its own time. One would be grateful if it were merely a matter of incomprehension. Instead, the work is usually refitted and appropriated by various entities-some playing the part of the opponent; others, that of the proponent. P.3-4”

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) German philosopher (idealism)

Philosophy and Religion 1804)

Art, Time, Parting

“Nothing excited me more than opening up the atlas and seeing places and seas, imagining what they looked like and what kind of life the people had.”

Lewis Pugh (1969) Environmental campaigner, maritime lawyer and endurance swimmer

p 8
Achieving The Impossible (2010)

Life, People, Imagination

“Cursed be all those on land and sea who eat their fill,
cursed be all those who starve yet raise no hand in protest,
cursed be all the bread, the wine, the meat which day by day
descends deep in the entrails of the exploited man
and turns not into freedom's cry, the murderer's ruthless knife!”

Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957) Greek writer

Prayer of three revolutionaries, Book X, line 391
The Odyssey : A Modern Sequel (1938)

Freedom, Wine, Cry

“Always to me any aroused group was a good group, and therefore I accepted an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the Ku Klux Klan at Silver Lake, New Jersey, one of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing. […] Never before had I looked into a sea of faces like these. I was sure that if I uttered one word, such as abortion, outside the usual vocabulary of these women they would go off into hysteria. And so my address that night had to be in the most elementary terms, as though I were trying to make children understand. In the end, through simple illustrations I believed I had accomplished my purpose. A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered. The conversation went on and on, and when we were finally through it was too late to return to New York.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

Source: Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (1938), Chapter 29, "While the Doctors Consult", p. 366.

Women, Children, Understanding, Night

“To the mind of superficial men the future of different races has already brought disaster and ruin upon the country. The poor negro has been charged with all our woes. In the haste of these men they forget that our trouble was not ethnological, but moral, that it was not difference of complexion, but difference of conviction. It was not the Ethiopian as a man, but the Ethiopian as a slave and a coveted article of merchandise, that gave us trouble. I close these remarks as I began. If our action shall be in accordance with the principles of justice, liberty, and perfect human equality, no eloquence can adequately portray the greatness and grandeur of the future of the republic. We shall spread the network of our science and our civilization over all who seek their shelter, whether from Asia, Africa, or the isles of the sea. We shall mold them all, each after his kind, into Americans. Indian and Celt, Negro and Saxon, Latin and Teuton, Mongolian and Caucasian, Jew and gentile, all shall here bow to the same law, speak the same language, support the same government, enjoy the same liberty, vibrate with the same national enthusiasm, and seek the same national ends.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

Men, Justice, Law, Support

“In this world with starry dome,
Floored with gemlike plains and seas,
Shall I never feel at home,
Never wholly be at ease?”

William Watson (poet) (1858–1935) English poet, born 1858

World-Strangeness, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

World, Feeling, Home

“Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

London, 1802, l. 9 (1807).

Life, Way, Travel, Soul

“Without any coherent national organisation to repel from the land on which they had settled the ever-unknowable descents from the seas, the Saxons, now for four centuries entitled to be deemed the owners of the soil, very nearly succumbed completely to the Danish inroads. That they did not was due--as almost every critical turn of historic fortune has been due--to the sudden apparition in an era of confusion and decay of one of the great figures of history.”

Winston S. Churchill book A History of the English-Speaking Peoples

On King Alfred the Great; Vol I; The Birth of Britain.
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956–58)

History

“I myself have travelled west as far as K'ung-t'ung, north past Cho-lu, east to the sea, and in the south I have sailed the Yellow and Huai Rivers. The elders and old men of these various lands frequently pointed out to me the places where the Yellow Emperor, Yao, and Shun had lived, and in these places the manners and customs seemed quite different. In general those of their accounts which do not differ from the ancient texts seem to be near to the truth.”

Sima Qian book Records of the Grand Historian

translation by Burton Watson I once traveled west to Mount K’ung-t'ung and passed Cho-lu [Mountain] in the north; to the east I drifted along the coast, and to the south I floated over the Huai River and the Chiang. Wherever I went, all of the village elders would point out for me sites of The Huang-ti, Yao and Shun. The traditions were certainly very different from each other. In sum, [those accounts of the elders] which were not far from the ancient-text versions [of the classics], tend to be plausible. translated by Tsai-fa Cheng, Zongli Lu, William H. Nienhauser, Jr., and Robert Reynolds, in The Grand Scribe’s Records, edited by William H. Nienhauser, Jr. 五帝本紀 https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E5%8F%B2%E8%A8%98/%E5%8D%B7001 Records of the Grand Historian

Men, Truth, Travel, Past

“Allah, who is the only true God and has no other emanation, endowed the king of Islam with the strength to destroy this ancient shrine on the eastern sea-coast and to plunge it into the sea, and after its destruction, he ordered the nose of the image of Jagannath to be perforated and disgraced it by casting it down on the ground. They dug out other idols, which were worshipped by the polytheists in the kingdom of Jajnagar, and overthrew them as they did the image of Jagannath, for being laid in front of the mosques along the path of the Sunnis and way of the musallis (the multitude who offer prayers) and stretched them in front of the portals of every mosque, so that the body and sides of the images may be trampled at the time of ascent and descent, entrance and exit, by the shoes on the feet of the Muslims.”

Firuz Shah Tughlaq (1309–1388) Tughluq sultan

Puri (Orissa). Sirat-Firuz Shahi, quoted in R.C. Majumdar (ed.), Vol. VI, The Delhi Sultanate, Bombay, Majumdar, R.C. (ed.), The History and Culture of the Indian People: Volume VI: The Delhi Sultanate, Bombay, 1960.

God, Shoe, Way, Time

“So God stepped over to the edge of the world
And He spat out the seven seas;
He batted His eyes, and the lightnings flashed;
He clapped His hands, and the thunders rolled;
And the waters above the earth came down,
The cooling waters came down.”

James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) writer and activist

The Creation, st. 6.
God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927)

God, World, Water

“In the whole history of the sea, there is little to equal the wonderful behavior of these humble players.”

Steve Turner (1949) British writer

Source: The Band That Played On (Thomas Nelson, 2011), p. 11

Behavior, History

“All the diamonds in this world
That mean anything to me
Are conjured up
by wind and sunlight sparkling on the sea
I ran aground in a harbor town
Lost the taste for being free
Thank God he sent some gull chased ship
To carry me to sea…”

Bruce Cockburn (1945) Canadian folk/rock guitarist and singer-songwriter

All the Diamonds in the World, Track 1
Salt, Sun and Time (1974)

God, World

“Well! according to the sketch your picture [which Whistler sent him in a letter] seems well-composed, the lines of sky, sea, the position of the figures all that seems very, very well done[, ] on opening the letter it struck me immediately, an impression of decorative ornamentation which makes a good picture appeal to the eye as well - upside down and any other way up. Arrangement, layout, composition. etc - mysterious words harmonious laws - in no way conventional - needs of the Artist glory of the Raphael's Michelangelo's etc etc - for me a repetition a hesitation, a matter of feeling - which should also be a law, a mathematical thing, like form, like light, colour[. ] I find similarities with the colour method which works by opposing colours to arrive at a harmony that is to say to make a canvas a complete whole, to put into a small space an image with all the forces all the principles of nature - [instead of showing a part of it]..”

Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904) painter from France

quote from a letter of Fantin-Latour, Paris 7-14 October 1862 to James Whistler; from The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler - Repository: Glasgow University Library http://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence/people/display/?cid=1075&nameid=Manet_E&sr=0&surname=&firstname=&rs=1 - System Number: 01075; Call Number: MS Whistler F 6.

Law, Way, Feeling, Mathematics

“A wet sheet and a flowing sea,
A wind that follows fast,
And fills the white and rustling sail,
And bends the gallant mast.
And bends the gallant mast, my boys,
While like the eagle free
Away the good ship flies, and leaves
Old England on the lee.”

Allan Cunningham

"A Wet Sheet and a Flowing Sea"; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Boy

“Imagine a book of unexplained mysteries written by a contemporary of Shakespeare. It might include the mystery of the falling stars that sweep through the sky foretelling disaster; the mystery of the Kraken, the giant sea devil with 50-foot tentacles; the mystery of monster bones, sometimes found in caves or on beaches. Such a book would be a curious mixture of truth and absurdity, fact and legend. We would all feel superior as we turned its pages and murmured: "Of course, they didn't know about comets and giant squids and dinosaurs." If this book should happen to find its way into the hands of our remote descendants, they may smile pityingly and say: "It's incredible to think that they knew nothing about epsilon fields or multiple psychic feedback or cross gravitational energies. They didn't even know about the ineluctability of time."”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

But let us hope that such a descendant is in a charitable mood, and might add: "And yet they managed to ask a few of the right questions."
Source: Enigmas and Mysteries (1976), p. 142

Truth, Books, Smile, Hope

“The sea
For the sky
Confuses its white sheep
With pure angels
The sea
Shepherdess of the blue Infinite”

Charles Trenet (1913–2001) French singer-songwriter

"La Mer" (1943)

Angels

“Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated And let my cry come unto Thee.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Ash-Wednesday (1930)

Sister, Suffering, Cry

“Over this country, when the giant Eagle flings the shadow of his wing, the land is darkened. So compact is it that the wing covers all its extent in one pause of the flight. The sea breaks on the pale line of the shore; to the Eagle's proud glance waves run in to the foot of the hills that are like rocks planted in green water.”

Hugh Walpole (1884–1941) New Zealand writer

Rogue Herries (1930) First lines

Water, Country

“As this brook not only washes off impurities, but overwhelms them, so that they can no longer be found, even so Thy Divine mercy, and the stream of my Saviour's blood, not only purge away, but extinguish my sins, sweeping them into the depths of the sea, where through all eternity they shall be remembered no more.”

Christian Scriver (1629–1693) German hymnwriter

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 83.

“The tiny fish enjoy themselves
in the sea.
Quick little splinters of life,
their little lives are fun to them
in the sea.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

Little Fish (1929)

Life, Fish

“If we are to project our power against the vital areas of any enemy across the ocean before beachheads on enemy territory are captured, it must be by air-sea power; by aircraft launched from carriers; and by heavy surface ships and submarines projecting guided missiles and rockets. If present promise is developed by research, test and production, these three types of air-sea power operating in concert will be able within the next ten years critically to damage enemy vital areas many hundreds of miles inland.
Naval task forces including these types are capable of remaining at sea for months. This capability has raised to a high point the art of concentrating air power within effective range of enemy objectives.”

Chester W. Nimitz (1885–1966) United States Navy fleet admiral

Employment of Naval Forces (1948)

Art

“Wonderful lovely there she sat,
Singing the night away,
All in the solitudinous sea
Of that there lonely bay.”

Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) English poet and fiction writer

Sam.

Love, Singing, Night

“They grew in beauty side by side,
They filled one home with glee:
Their graves are severed far and wide
By mount and stream and sea.”

Felicia Hemans (1793–1835) English poet

The Graves of a Household http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/hemans/records/graves.html, st. 1.

Beauty, Home

“I thought I might teach philosophy but the atmosphere of a college faculty repelled me; the few islands of greatness seemed to be washed by seas of pettiness and mediocrity.”

I. F. Stone (1907–1989) American investigative journalist and author

I.F. Stone's Bi-Weekly (1971-12-14)

“In Islam, there is no priesthood, and no intermediary between the creature and The Creator; but every Muslim from the ends of earth or in the paths of the sea has the ability of himself to approach his Lord without priest or minister. Nor again can the Muslim administrator derive his authority from any papacy, or from Heaven; but he derives it solely from the Muslim community. Similarly, he derives his principles of administration from the religious law, which is universal in its understanding and application and before which all men come everywhere as equals.”

Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966) Egyptian author, educator, Islamic theorist, poet, and politician

Source: Social Justice in Islam (1953), p. 30

Men, Law, Communication, Understanding

“The mystery, the romance, the coincidence of real life far transcends the mystery and the romance and the coincidence of fiction. I would like at the beginning of my remarks to remind hon. Members of something that has always struck me as one of the strangest and most romantic coincidences that have entered into our political life. Far away in time, in the dawn of history, the greatest race of the many races then emerging from prehistoric mists was the great Aryan race. When that race left the country which it occupied in the western part of Central Asia, one great branch moved west, and in the course of their wanderings they founded the cities of Athens and Sparta; they founded Rome; they made Europe, and in the veins of the principal nations of Europe flows the blood of their Aryan forefathers. The speech of the Aryans which they brought with them has spread through out Europe. It has spread to America. It has spread to the Dominions beyond the seas. At the same time, one branch went south, and they crossed the Himalayas. They went into the Punjab and they spread through India, and, as an historic fact, ages ago, there stood side by side in their ancestral land the ancestors of the English people and the ancestors of the Rajputs and of the Brahmins. And now, after aeons have passed, the children of the remotest generations from that ancestry have been brought together by the inscrutable decree of Providence to set themselves to solve the most difficult, the most complicated political problem that has ever been set to any people of the world.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1929/nov/07/india in the House of Commons (7 November 1929). 1929

Life, Children, People, Age

“To the Kathakali Man these stories are his children and his childhood. He has grown up within them. They are the house he was raised in, the meadows he played in. They are his windows and his way of seeing. So when he tells a story, he handles it as he would a child of his own. He teases it. He punishes it. He sends it up like a bubble. He wrestles it to the ground and lets it go again. He laughs at it because he loves it. He can fly you across whole worlds in minutes, he can stop for hours to examine a wilting leaf. Or play with a sleeping monkey's tail. He can turn effortlessly from the carnage of war into the felicity of a woman washing her hair in a mountain stream. From the crafty ebullience of a rakshasa with a new idea into a gossipy Malayali with a scandal to spread. From the sensuousness of a woman with a baby at her breast into the seductive mischief of Krishna's smile. He can reveal the nugget of sorrow that happiness contains. The hidden fish of shame in a sea of glory.
He tells stories of the gods, but his yarn is spun from the ungodly, human heart.
The Kathakali Man is the most beautiful of men. Because his body is his soul. His only instrument. From the age of three he has been planed and polished, pared down, harnessed wholly to the task of story-telling. He has magic in him, this man within the painted mark and swirling skirts.
But these days he has become unviable. Unfeasible. Condemned goods. His children deride him. They long to be everything that he is not. He has watched them grow up to become clerks and bus conductors. Class IV non-gazetted officers. With unions of their own.
But he himself, left dangling somewhere between heaven and earth, cannot do what they do. He cannot slide down the aisles of buses, counting change and selling tickets. He cannot answer bells that summon him. He cannot stoop behind trays of tea and Marie biscuits.
In despair he turns to tourism. He enters the market. He hawks the only thing he owns. The stories that his body can tell.
He becomes a Regional Flavour.”

Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things

page 230-231.
The God of Small Things (1997)

Love, Men, God, War

“O cool glad pasture; living tree, tall corn,
Great cliff, or languid sloping sand, cold sea,
Waves: river curving; you, eternal flowers,
Give me content, while I can think of you:
Give me your living breath!
Back to your rampart, Death!”

Harold Monro (1879–1932) British poet

"Living", line 36, from Alida Monro (ed.) Collected Poems (London: Duckworth, [1933] 1970) p. 13.

Death, Flowers, Thinking, Tree

“The Achaeans of north Greece, which was later to be called Thessaly, seem to have been the great sea-adventurers of the heroic age. With this country were connected the memories of early Greek exploration of the Euxine, in the legend of the ship Argo. And to the Achaeans of Thessaly we must probably refer the earliest notice which preserves the Achaean name in a historical document. An Egyptian writing tells us that they came in company with other peoples "from the lands of the sea" and invaded Egypt in the year 1229 B. C., when Memptah was king. But the great achievement which made the Achaeans illustrious was one in which southern and northern Greece combined—the expedition against Troy.”

J. B. Bury (1861–1927) Irish historian and freethinker

2nd ed. (1913), p. 45 http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015026609167;view=1up;seq=77 A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great (1913)

People, Age, Memory, Country

“The sea — this 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 book The Mirror of the Sea

Source: The Mirror of the Sea (1906), Ch. 36

Truth, Faith, Courage

“As the plane climbed over the town and swung above the sea I knew how it felt to go into exile.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 310.

“It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Affluent Society

Source: The Affluent Society (1958), Chapter 11, Section IV, p. 130

“Muslim power again suffered a setback after the death of Alauddin Khalji in 1316 AD. But it was soon revived by the Tughlaqs. By now most of the famous temples over the length and breadth of the Islamic empire in India had been demolished, except in Orissa and Rajasthan which had retained their independence. By now most of the rich treasuries had been plundered and shared between the Islamic state and its swordsmen. Firuz Shah Tughlaq led an expedition to Orissa in 1360 AD. He destroyed the temple of Jagannath at Puri, and desecrated many other Hindu shrines….
After the sack of the temples in Orissa, Firuz Shah Tughlaq attacked an island on the sea-coast where 'nearly 100,000 men of Jajnagar had taken refuge with their women, children, kinsmen and relations'. The swordsmen of Islam turned 'the island into a basin of blood by the massacre of the unbelievers'. A worse fate overtook the Hindu women. Sirat-i-Firuz Shahi records: 'Women with babies and pregnant ladies were haltered, manacled, fettered and enchained, and pressed as slaves into service in the house of every soldier.' Still more horrible scenes were enacted by Firuz Shah Tughlaq at Nagarkot (Kangra) where he sacked the shrine of Jvalamukhi. Firishta records that the Sultan 'broke the idols of Jvalamukhi, mixed their fragments with the flesh of cows and hung them in nosebags round the necks of Brahmins. He sent the principal idol as trophy to Medina.”

Firuz Shah Tughlaq (1309–1388) Tughluq sultan

S.R. Goel, The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India

Death, Women, Men, Fate

“There is a silence where hath been no sound,
There is a silence where no sound may be,—
In the cold grave, under the deep, deep sea,
Or in the wide desert where no life is found.”

Thomas Hood (1799–1845) British writer

Sonnet, Silence; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
20th century

Life, Silence

“Everything in existence prays for the forgiveness of the person who teaches the Qur’an - even the fish in the sea.”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Usulul Kafi, Volume 3, Page 301
Shi'ite Hadith

Forgiveness, Fish, Personality

“Now gold hath sway; we all obey
And a ruthless king is he;
But he never shall send our ancient friend
To be tost on the stormy sea.”

Henry Fothergill Chorley (1808–1872) English literary, art and music critic and editor

The brave old Oak (lyrics, 1837).

“Give a man a girl he can love,
As I, O my love, love thee;
And his heart is great with the pulse of Fate,
At home, on land, on sea.”

James Thomson (B.V.) (1834–1882) Scottish writer (1834-1882)

Part XV
Sunday Up the River (1865)

Love, Fate, Home, Girl

“A ship is alive, and he is like a man, with a true man’s heart. Treat him well and care for him properly, and he will fight for you against the worst sea. He will fight to keep you alive even after the sea has long since given him his own deathstroke. Neglect him, though, ignore the small warnings he gives of danger, and he will drown you in a flat sea beneath a cloudless sky.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Jorin din Jubai White Wing
(15 September 1992)

Heart, Fight

“A rude and boisterous captain of the sea.”

John Home Douglas

Act iv, scene 1.
Douglas (first performed 1756)

“"I only remember one part of the service," he said, "and that is 'And the body shall be cast into the sea.'”

Jack London book The Sea-Wolf

So cast it in."
Source: The Sea-Wolf (1904), Chapter Three

Parting

“The morn was fair, the skies were clear,
No breath came o'er the sea.”

Charles Jefferys (1807–1865) British music publisher

The Rose of Allandale, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“All the Hellenistic States had thus been completely subjected to the protectorate of Rome, and the whole empire of Alexander the Great had fallen to the Roman commonwealth just as if the city had inherited it from his heirs. From all sides kings and ambassadors flocked to Rome to congratulate her; they showed that fawning is never more abject than when kings are in the antechamber…w:Polybius dates from the battle of Pydna the full establishment of the universal empire of Rome. It was in fact the last battle in which a civilized state confronted Rome in the field on a footing of equality with her as a great power; all subsequent struggles were rebellions or wars with peoples beyond the pale of the Romano-Greek civilization -- with barbarians, as they were called. The whole civilized world thenceforth recognized in the Roman senate the supreme tribunal, whose commissions decided in the last resort between kings and nations; and to acquire its language and manners foreign princes and youths of quality resided in Rome. A clear and earnest attempt to get rid of this dominion was in reality made only once -- by the great Mithradates of Pontus. The battle of pydna, moreover, marks the last occasion on which the senate still adhered to the state-maxim that that they should, if possible, hold no possessions and maintain no garrisons beyond the Italian seas, but should keep the numerous states dependent on them in order by a mere political supremacy. The aim aim of their policy was that these states should neither decline into utter weakness and anarchy, as had nevertheless happened in Greece nor emerge out of their half-free position into complete independence, as Macedonia had attempted to do without success. No state was to be allowed to utterly perish, but no one was to be permitted to stand on its own resources… Indications of a change of system, and of an increasing disinclination on the part of Rome to tolerate by its side intermediate states even in such independence as was possible for them, were clearly given in the destruction of the Macedonian monarchy after the battle of Pydna, the more and more frequent and more unavoidable the intervention in the internal affairs of the petty Greek states through their misgovernment, and their political and social anarchy, the disarming of Macedonia, where the Northern forntier at any rate urgently required a defence different from that of mere posts; and, lastly, the introduction of the payment of land-tax to Rome from Macedonia and Illyria, were so many symptoms of the approaching conversion of the client states into subjects of Rome.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

The Changing of the Relationship between Rome and Her Client-States
The History Of Rome, Volume 2. Chapter 10. "The Third Macedonian War" Translated by W.P.Dickson
The History of Rome - Volume 2

War, People, Youth, World

“The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.”

George Gordon Byron book Hebrew Melodies

The Destruction of Sennacherib http://englishhistory.net/byron/poems/destruct.html, st. 1. Hebrew Melodies (1815)

Star, Wolf

“Oh, my love
You're searching
For your name
Beside the sea
Of dwells and dreams
Where Shadows're dancing
For your glance…
The sky would chance
The granting of a dream
To the restless soul
That dwells within your heart…”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Children of the Sun (1969)

Love, Dreams, Soul, Search

“Sun-swept beaches with a light wind blowing
From the immense blue circle of the sea,
And the soft thunder where long waves whiten —
These were the same for Sappho as for me. Two thousand years — much has gone by forever,
Change takes the gods and ships and speech of men —
But here on the beaches that time passes over
The heart aches now as then.”

Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) American writer and poet

"The Unchanging"
Flame and Shadow (1920)

Men, God, Light, Change

“The conflict between liberty under divine authority and the absolutism of human authorities ended disastrously. …In the very year 586 [BCE], in which the flood of Asiatic despotism closed over the city which had been, and was destined again to be, the sanctuary of freedom in the East, a new home was prepared for it in the West, where, guarded by the sea and the mountains, and by valiant hearts, that stately plant was reared under whose shade we dwell, and which is extending its invincible arms so slowly and yet so surely over the civilised world.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

World, Home, Mountain, Freedom

“Fifty-six years after its founding by the science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, who died in 1986, the church is fighting off calls by former members for a Reformation. The defectors say Sea Org members were repeatedly beaten by the church’s chairman, David Miscavige, often during planning meetings; pressured to have abortions; forced to work without sleep on little pay; and held incommunicado if they wanted to leave. The church says the defectors are lying.”

David Miscavige (1960) leader of the Church of Scientology

[Laurie, Goodstein, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/us/07scientology.html, Defectors Say Church of Scientology Hides Abuse, The New York Times, The New York Times Company, A1, March 6, 2010, 2010-07-03].
About

Lying, Sleep, Science, Fight

“Life exists immersed in a sea of unconsciousness", he reminded himself.
"In the drug, these people gain a view of that sea.”

Frank Herbert book The Santaroga Barrier

Source: The Santaroga Barrier (1968), Chapter Ten

Life, People

“The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall; nations perish; civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again, and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men’s hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead.

And even the books that do not last long, penetrate their own times at least, sailing farther than Ulysses even dreamed of, like ships on the seas. It is the author’s part to call into being their cargoes and passengers,—living thoughts and rich bales of study and jeweled ideas. And as for the publishers, it is they who build the fleet, plan the voyage, and sail on, facing wreck, till they find every possible harbor that will value their burden.”

Clarence Day (1874–1935) American writer

The Story of the Yale University Press Told by a Friend (1920), pp. 7–8.

Men, Books, World, Dreams

“The time when Russia could be kept out of the world's oceans has gone forever. We shall sail all the world's seas; no force on earth can prevent us.”

Matvei Zakharov (1898–1972) Soviet military commander

Quoted in "Soviet Russia and the Middle East" - Page 46 - by Aaron S. Klieman - 1970

World, Time

“Ye gentlemen of England
That live at home at ease,
Ah! little do you think upon
The dangers of the seas.”

Martin Parker (1624–1647) English ballad writer

Ye Gentlemen of England, (c. 1630), reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Home, Thinking

“Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores, and mountains; and thou too art wont to desire such things very much. But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself. For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Variant translation: Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.
IV, 3.
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book IV

Men, Art, Soul, Mountain

“I suddenly stopped and looked out at the sea and thought, my God, how beautiful this is … for 26 years I had never really looked at it before.”

Alfred Jules Ayer (1910–1989) English philosopher

On his greater appreciation of the scenery of the world, after his near-death experience, as quoted in "Did atheist philosopher see God when he 'died'?" by William Cash, in National Post (3 March 2001).

God, Beauty

“You don't know what I'm up against. Because it's full of, of, of things that are only correct because they're grammatical, but they're tough on the ear, you see. This is a very wearying one. It's unpleasant to read. Unrewarding. "Because Findus freeze the cod at sea, and then add a crumb-crisp" Ooh, "crumb-crisp coating." Ahh, that's tough, "crumb-crisp coating." I think, no, because of the way it's written, you need to break it up, because it's not, it's not as conversationally written.”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

The Findus Foods "Frozen Peas" Session Out-Takes

Way, Thinking, Reading

“For me, my craft is sailing on,
Through mists to-day, clear seas anon.
Whate’er the final harbor be
’T is good to sail upon the sea!”

John Kendrick Bangs (1862–1922) American author, editor and satirist

The Voyage.

“Jumbled black rocks adorned an otherwise pale, flat landscape of salmons and khakis. Mountains rose in distant ridges. Out there in the Namaqua sea, I found myself thinking of South Africa as an island. Like Robinson Crusoe, I was walking its perimeter, noting the extent of my domain, checking for cannibals, finding fresh water. Sure, there were 47 million others who might make such a claim, but theirs were no more valid than mine, only similar. Beating my drum, singing the land, proclaiming it mine from coast to coast.”

Justin D. Fox (1967) South African author, photojournalist, lecturer and editor

The Marginal Safari: Scouting the Edge of South Africa (2010)

Mountain, Thinking, Water, Distant

“Into the sunset’s turquoise marge
The moon dips, like a pearly barge;
Enchantment sails through magic seas,
To fairyland Hesperides,
Over the hills and away.”

Madison Cawein (1865–1914) poet from Louisville, Kentucky

At Sunset, stanza 1.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1919)

“If you drive a nation to adopt procedures which run counter to its instincts, you weaken and may destroy the motive force of its action…You will realise that I am speaking of the frequent suggestion that the United Kingdom should join a federation on the continent of Europe. This is something which we know, in our bones, we cannot do…For Britain's story and her interests lie far beyond the continent of Europe. Our thoughts move across the seas to the many communities in which our people play their part, in every corner of the world. These are our family ties. That is our life: without it we should be no more than some millions of people living in an island off the coast of Europe, in which nobody wants to take any particular interest.”

Anthony Eden (1897–1977) British Conservative politician, prime minister

Speech to the Columbia University, New York (January 1952), quoted in Anthony Eden, Full Circle (Cassell, 1960), pp. 36-7

Life, People, Lie, World

“Your quest is for darkness only. This sea is not your sea. The myths of men are not your myths. Men’s treasures are not yours.”

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

Interview With The Vampire (1976)

Men

“The next time you dine on sushi -- or sashimi, or swordfish steak, or shrimp cocktail, whatever wildlife you happen to enjoy from the ocean -- think of the real cost. For every pound that goes to market, more than 10 pounds, even 100 pounds, may be thrown away as bycatch. This is the consequence of not knowing that there are limits to what we can take out of the sea.”

Sylvia Earle (1935) American oceanographer

Quote from her 2009 TED talk http://www.ted.com/talks/sylvia_earle_s_ted_prize_wish_to_protect_our_oceans

Thinking, Time

“Whilst the misguided Follower climbs with Pain,
Mountains of Whimsies, heapt in his own Brain,
Stumbling from Thought to Thought, falls headlong down
Into Doubt’s boundless Sea, where like to drown,
Books bear him up a-while, and make him try
To swim with Bladders of Philosophy.”

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647–1680) English poet, and peer of the realm

ll. 16–21.
A Satire Against Mankind (1679)

Pain, Books, Mountain

“I knew she wasn't English
Because she spoke it far too well
The grammar was goodly, the verbs as they should be
And the slang was bang on the bell
So as the language barrier clanged and banged
I couldn't hear--hear or see
England, London, and Bow
Crumbled into the sea.”

Pete Doherty (1979) English musician, writer, actor, poet and artist

Recited on Newsnight with Kirsty Wark, December 22, 2004
Lyrics and poetry

“Better understanding of the Asian mind ‑ Indian and Chinese ‑ had one further consequence which needs emphasis. It had been almost a dogma of European thought that everything of value arose in the regions that touched the Aegean Sea. Religion, philosophy, art and even science, it was claimed, originated in this area. In fact, for all civilization a Greek origin was postulated. A persistence in this belief was responsible in the early years of Oriental research for the futile attempts made to date events in Asia, especially Indian history, to periods where they could be conveniently adjusted to developments in Greece. That belief in a monopoly of wisdom for the Greeks had to be reluctantly abandoned, as a result of increased knowledge of Asian civilizations. The liberalization of the Furopean mind consequent upon the recognition of the fact that all nations have contributed towards the growth of human civilization, is a gain of considerable significance.”

K. M. Panikkar (1895–1963) Indian diplomat, academic and historian

Asia and Western Dominance: a survey of the Vasco Da Gama epoch of Asian history, 1498–1945

Wisdom, Religion, Art, History

“The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.”

Walter Pater (1839–1894) essayist, art and literature critic, fiction writer

On the Mona Lisa, in Leonardo da Vinci The Renaissance http://www.authorama.com/renaissance-1.html (1873)

Love, Life, Women, Men

“Last year in Florida, at Sea World Florida, an animal trainer was killed by a killer whale… HUH. Turns out, there's a reason why they didn't name them "ocean ponies." Some things are exactly as they seem, folks. Killer whales kill, pilot whales wear dark sunglasses. I'm not sure how the sperm whale got his name… but I'm not getting in the pool.”

Ron White (1956) American comedian

A Little Unprofessional

World, Animals

““We met five years ago.“ Jean scratched his beard. “On a sea voyage. We became business partners out of sheer boredom. Since then we‘ve been inseparable.“
“Except that my plan calls for me to be plotting your death.“
“Yes, but I don‘t know that, do I? Boon companion! I suspect nothing.“”

Scott Lynch book Red Seas Under Red Skies

“Chump! I can hardly wait to see you get yours!“
Reminiscence “Best-Laid Plans” section 1 (pp. 114-115)
Red Seas Under Red Skies (2007)

Death, Business, Waiting

“O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.”

Hart Crane (1899–1932) American writer

To Brooklyn Bridge, Stanza 11; from The Bridge

God, Dreams

“A thousand ardent oilers swung the long spout 'twixt their nods,
And tried to glimpse a meaning in the challenge of the gods.

And then one night there landed on a Mineola swale
A plane that looked like pewter, with a carrier of mail.

Its wings were tinged like tea-box skins, each truss of shadow gray,
Its cabin but an alcove slung beneath a metal ray.

The Spirit of St. Louis was inscribed upon the lee;
It came from out a province that had never seen the sea.”

Nathalia Crane (1913–1998) American writer

Venus Invisible and Other Poems (1928), The Wings of Lead

God, Tea, Night, Box

“Daybreak comes quickly nowadays
The scent of wind has changed
It seems familiar yet unfamiliar
It makes my heartbeat quicker
It's sweet and sad
We ran along the road to the sea
Screaming with laughter innocently
In the far-away summer days”

Ayumi Hamasaki (1978) Japanese recording artist, lyricist, model, and actress

Fairyland
Lyrics, (Miss)Understood

Sadness, Laughter, Change, Summer

“They stood aloof, the scars remaining,—
Like cliffs which had been rent asunder:
A dreary sea now flows between.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Christabel

Part II
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Christabel

“After September 11th I had tons of interviews everywhere, except the United States of course, and often it was national radio and TV. A couple of times it turned out to be Irish television and BBC back to back, and the difference in reaction was startling. If I said this much on Irish TV, OK, discussion over, everyone understands what I'm talking about. You try to say it on BBC, you have to go on for like about an hour to explain to them what you mean. The Irish sea is a chasm, and it just depends who's been holding the whip for 800 years and who's been under it for 800 years.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

In Noam Chomsky - Rebel Without a Pause, 2003 http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2003/05/1614027.php Quotes 2000s, 2003

Understanding, Time, Dependency

“John F. Kennedy … murdered in Dallas by some hapless geek named Oswald who worked for either Castro, the mob, Jimmy Hoffa, the CIA, his dominatrix landlady or the odious, degenerate FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. The list is long and crazy — maybe Marilyn Monroe's first husband fired those shots from the grassy knoll. Who knows? A whole generation of American journalists is still embarrassed by their failure to answer that question. JFK's ghost will haunt the corridors of power in America for as long as the grass is green and the rivers run to the sea. Take my word for it, Bubba. I have heard his footsteps for 30 years and I still feel guilty about not being able to explain the biggest news story of my lifetime to my son.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Better than Sex (22 August 1994)
1990s

Feeling, Failure, Question, Grass

“Say, its only a paper moon
Sailing over a cardboard sea
But it wouldn't be make-believe
If you believed in me.”

Yip Harburg (1896–1981) American song lyricist

"It's Only a Paper Moon" (1933) (co-written with Billy Rose) - Nat King Cole version http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DotEKKX0ww

“The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.”

Sylvia Plath Ariel

"The Moon and the Yew Tree"
Ariel (1965)

Despair

“In response to the plummeting popularity of the Administration itself, revealed at Newbury and in the shire county elections, we have the Prime Minister's botched reshuffle. If we were to offer that tale of events to the BBC light entertainment department as a script for a programme, I think that the producers of "Yes, Minister" would have turned it down as hopelessly over the top. It might have even been too much for "Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'em". The tragedy for us all is that it is really happening— it is fact, not fiction. The man with the non-Midas touch is in charge. It is no wonder that we live in a country where the Grand National does not start and hotels fall into the sea.”

John Smith (1938–1994) Labour Party leader from Scotland (1938-1994)

Hansard http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199293/cmhansrd/1993-06-09/Debate-1.html, House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 226, col. 292. House of Commons speech, 9 June 1993. That year's Grand National horse race had been declared void after a start-line mishap. The Holbeck Hall Hotel in Scarborough began to fall into the sea on 3 June 1993 due to coastal erosion.

Thinking, Light, Country

“I was consumed by a sea of people with heaven-bound hands, their eyes full of adoration for the guitar-carrying man on stage who, from his gentle doe eyes to his scraggly brown beard and flowing hair, served as stock-image white Jesus placeholder.”

Chris Stedman (1987) American activist

Source: Faitheist (2012), Chapter 3, “Conversion and Confusion” (p. 37)

People

“I never used to miss the chance to climb up on his knee
And listen to the many tales of life upon the sea.
We'd go sailing back on Barkentines we'd talk of things he did
Tomorrow just a day away, for the Captain and the kid.”

Jimmy Buffett (1946) American singer–songwriter and businessman

The Captain and the Kid
Song lyrics, Down to Earth (1970)

Life, Chance

“Sky, not spirit, do they change, those who cross the sea.”
Caelum, non animum mutant, qui trans mare currunt.

Horace book Epistles

Book I, epistle xi, line 27
Epistles (c. 20 BC and 14 BC)

Change

“In Daniel 7, Daniel had a vision where “the four winds of the heavens strove upon the great sea. And four beasts came up from the sea, diverse one from another” (vv. 2-3). In the vision, Daniel saw a lion with eagle’s wings, a bear with three ribs in its mouth, a leopard with four wings, and a terrible beast with iron teeth and ten horns (v. 7). Bible scholars have speculated on the meaning of this passage for centuries. Some think the four beasts in this chapter represent a rehash of the first four empires from Babylon to the Roman Empire; while others think it is all yet in the future. I’m no scholar but here is my opinion: I (and many Bible scholars) think the four beasts are four world powers that will “strive” for world power (domination?) at the end of time before the one with ten horns finally becomes dominant. I think the four beasts are interpreted as follows: The lion sometimes standing like a man with eagle’s wings (v. 4) represents England (whose symbol as always been the lion) and America (whose symbol is the eagle) united, as one of four major end-time powers. The eagle’s wings “were plucked” and “it was lifted up from the earth, and made to stand upon the feet as a man, and a man’s heart was given to it” (v. 4). My best guess is that America will soon cease to be a world power (wings plucked) but there will still be enough of a godly influence that the English/American alliance will have some “heart” or compassion and maybe even be able to finally “take a stand” for God in the wicked world. I think the bear (v. 5) is Russia (whose symbol is the bear) and the three ribs in its mouth represent three countries it has dominated or “eaten,” such as Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, or perhaps Ukraine, Belarus, and Georgia. The leopard with four wings (v. 6) could be some sort of oriental alliance between China, Japan, Korea, and a Southeast Asia alliance (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, etc.). Verse 6 says, “dominion was given to it.” Many certainly feel that China is soon to be the major economic (and military) power in the world. If they could get a military or economic alliance with some of the other oriental nations mentioned, they would indeed be a force to be reckoned with! No animal is named for the fourth beast. It is only described as being dreadful, terrible, strong exceedingly, having great iron teeth, different from all other beasts and having ten horns. As I said earlier there are three options from what I can see for this beast. It is either (A) the European Common Market or a future similar alliance; or (B) 10 world regions and (C) some sort of alliance of Muslim nations around the Middle East or the world. I tend to go with option (C)”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 94-95

God, World, Feeling, Thinking

“This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak.”

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) Polish-British writer

Youth, A Narrative http://www.gutenberg.org/files/525/525.txt (1902)

Men

“One morning with Ripolin [French paint] I painted a new-born that I then left to dry on the tennis-court. After two days I found it bristling with ants that made it move to the anesthetized, silent rhythm of sea-urchins. However I at once realized that this newborn child was none other than the pink breast of my girlfriend, being frenetically eaten by the shining, metallic thickness of the phonograph. But it wasn't her breast either: it was little pieces of my cigarette paper nervously grouped around the magnetic topaz of my fiancees ring.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Quote from 'Mon amie et la plage' [My girlfriend and the beach], Salvador Dali, 1927; as quoted in Dali and Me, Catherine Millet, - translation Trista Selous -, Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 8001 Zurich Switzerland, pp. 47-48
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1920 - 1930

Painting

“Now, the smoke fills the air
In this honky-tonk bar.
And I'm thinking 'bout where I'd rather be.
But I burned all my bridges;
I sank all my ships.
And I'm stranded at the edge of the sea.”

James Taylor (1948) American singer-songwriter and guitarist

"Bartender's Blues"
Song lyrics, JT (1977)

Thinking

“The planet is fine. The people are [bleeped out]. Because everyone is trying to save the planet. The planet doesn’t need that. The planet will take care of itself. People are selfish. And that's what they're doing is trying to save the planet for themselves to have a nicer place to live. They don't care about the planet in theory. They just care about having a comfortable place. And these people with the fires and the floods and everything, they overbuild, they put nature to the test and they get what's coming to them. That's what I say. That's what's happening, and I can't wait for the sea levels to rise. I can't wait for some of these cities to disappear. There are places that are going to go away. The map is going to change and that's because -- people think nature is outside of them. They don't take into them the idea that we are part of it. They say, "oh, we're going for a nature walk. We're going to the country because we like nature." Nature is in here. [points to chest] And if you're in tune with it, like the Indians, the Hopis, especially, the balance of life, the balance, the harmony of nature, if you understand that, you don't overbuild. You don’t do all this moron stuff.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

The View, 24 October 2007 http://newsbusters.org/blogs/justin-mccarthy/2007/10/24/george-carlins-view-wildfire-victims-get-whats-coming-them Interviews, Television Appearances

Life, People, Idea, Understanding