Quotes about the sea
page 16

“Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;
To feel the passion of Eternity?”

Edwin Markham (1852–1940) American poet

The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems (1899), The Man With the Hoe (1898)

God, Feeling, Search, Star

“We may find illustrations of the highest doctrines of science in games and gymnastics, in travelling by land and by water, in storms of the air and of the sea, and wherever there is matter in motion.”

James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) Scottish physicist

Introductory Lecture on Experimental Physics held at Cambridge in October 1871, re-edited by W. D. Niven (2003) in Volume 2 of The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, Courier Dover Publications, p. 243.

Travel, Game, Water, Science

“The Sultan is not slack in jihad. He never lets go of his spear or bridle in pursuing jihad by land and sea routes. This is his main occupation which engages his eyes and ears. He has spent vast sums for the establishment of the faith and the spread of Islam in these lands, as a result of which the light of Islam has reached the inhabitants and the flash of the true faith brightened among them. Fire temples have been destroyed and the images and idols of Budd have been broken, and the lands have been freed from those who were not included in the darul Islam, that is, those who had refused to become zimmis. Islam has been spread by him in the far east and has reached the point of sunrise. In the words of Abu Nasr al-Aini, he has carried the flags of the followers of Islam where they had never reached before and where no chapter or verse (of the Quran) had ever been recited. Thereafter he got mosques and places of worship erected, and music replaced by call to prayers (azan), and the incantations of fire-worshippers stopped by recitations of the Quran. He directed the people of Islam towards the citadels of the infidels and, by the grace of Allah, made them (the believers) inheritors of wealth and land and that country which they (the believers) had never trodden upon.”

Muhammad bin Tughluq (1290–1351) Turkic Sultan of Delhi

Tughlaq Kalina Bharata, Persian texts translated into Hindi by S.A.A. Rizvi, 2 Volumes, Aligarh, 1956-57. p. 325 ff. Vol I. (Shihabuddin Al Umari.) Also quoted (using a different translation) in Jain, Meenakshi (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts. 8th to 15th Centuries, p. 274.

People, Faith, Music, Light

“Yes, while I stood and gazed, my temples bare,
And shot my being through earth, sea, and air,
Possessing all things with intensest love,
O Liberty! my spirit felt thee there.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

France, An Ode. v
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Love

“"Hurrah! Hurrah! we bring the Jubilee!
Hurrah! Hurrah! the flag that makes you free!"
So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea,
While we were marching through Georgia.”

Henry Clay Work (1832–1884) American composer and songwriter

Song Marching Through Georgia

“The sea ebbs and flows, but the rock remains unmoved.”

Robert Murray M'Cheyne (1813–1843) British writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 101.

“The sea raises you to your feet. And dead calm.
Strands of light hold your hand. Now you have left
this shore. Now you are in the wind of an invisible sail.”

Mirkka Rekola (1931–2014) Finnish writer

Mirkka Rekola, Kuka lukee kanssasi (Who is Reading with You), 1990; Translated by Sari Hantula. Quoted at Mirkka Rekola http://www.electricverses.net/sakeet.php?poet=22&poem=645&language=3, at electricverses.net, accessed 20-03-2017.

Light, Dead

“Esperando (Cuando Cuba Sea Libre) is probably one of the most personal songs from the new [September, 2007] CD, "90 Millas"... as it really speaks about the celebration, nostalgia and emotion that will happen the day Cuba is free. If we're to move forward in Cuba, we really have to have a lot of forgiveness for each other and look towards the future.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

www.gloriaestefan.com (March 28, 2007)
2007, 2008

Forgiveness, Nostalgia, Future, Personality

“Leave the earth to the strong and athletic,
And the sea to adventure upon.
But the sun and the sand
No contractor can copy;
We lie in the land
Of the lotus and poppy;
We vegetate, calm and aesthetic,
On the beach, on the sand, in the sun.”

Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet

Many Long Years Ago (1945), Pretty Halcyon Days

Lie, Strong, Sun

“Hidden in the rainforests, deserts, and mountains of Latin America and the Caribbean lay the keys to reversing the impact of global climate change. The region claims the world’s largest single-source of oxygen, most diverse species of flora and fauna, and several Natural Wonders of the World that need our help. The next great challenge for our generation is to join together to save these precious resources that are rapidly disappearing due to the effects of rising sea levels and more extreme weather patterns.”

Geovanny Vicente (1986) Political Strategist, lawyer, international consultant, columnist and university professor

World, Mountain, Nature, Change

“Life is the gathering of waves to a head, at death they break into a million fragments each one of which, however, is absorbed at once into the sea of life and helps to form a later generation which comes rolling on till it too breaks.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Birth and Death, ii
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part I - Lord, What is Man?

Life, Death, Help

“The sea has neither meaning nor pity.”

Anton Chekhov book Gusev

Gusev (1890)

“What use is this valley to a family that comes from across the sea and knows nothing about the moon and the bonfires? You must have grown up there and have in in your bones, like wine and polenta, and then you know it without needing to speak about it and everything you have carried about inside you for so many years without knowing awakens now at the rattle of the chain on a cart, at the swish of an ox' tail, at the taste of a bowl of minestra, at the sound of a voice heard in the square at night.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

Source: The moon and the bonfire (1950), Chapter X, p. 56

Family, Wine, Night

“The island lies like a strange, misshapen dagger in the blue Ionian Sea, midway along the Greek and Albanian coastlines.
In the past, it has fallen into the hands of a dozen different nations, from all of which it has absorbed what it found good and rejected the rest, thus keeping its individuality. Unlike so many parts of Greece, it is green and lush, for when it was part of the Venetian empire they used it as their oil store, planting thousands of olive trees, so that now the bulk of the island is shaded by these carunculated giants with their wigs of silvery-green leaves. Between them run the admonishing fingers of black-green cypress, many planted in groves as dowries. All this creates a mystical landscape, bathed in sharp brittle sunlight, orchestrated by the knife-grinder song of the cicadas, framed in the blue, still sea. Of all the wonderful and fascinating parts of the planet I have been privileged to visit, Corfu is the nearest approach to home for me, since it was here, nurtured in sunlight, that my fascination for the living world around me came to fruition.”

Gerald Durrell (1925–1995) naturalist, zookeeper, conservationist, author and television presenter

How to Shoot an Amateur Naturalist (1984)

World, Home, Tree, Past

“We were making sand castles. Now we swim in the sea that swept them away”

Rem Koolhaas (1944) Dutch architect (b.1944)

What Ever Happened to Urbanism? http://www.arhns.uns.ac.rs/wp-content/uploads/Arch432_koolhaas.pdf The Monicelli Press, New York, 1995, pp. 959/971.

“The ancient Egyptians had a superstitious antipathy to the sea; a superstition nearly of the same kind prevails among the Indians; and the Chinese have never excelled in foreign commerce.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: (1776), Book II, Chapter V, p. 402.

“Believe that many precepts are better than much wealth; for wealth quickly fails us, but precepts abide through all time; for wisdom alone of all possessions is imperishable. Do not hesitate to travel a long road to those who profess to offer some useful instruction; for it were a shame, when merchants cross vast seas in order to increase their store of wealth, that the young should not endure even journeys by land to improve their understanding.”

Isocrates (-436–-338 BC) ancient greek rhetorician

Verse 19; variant translation: Of all our possessions, wisdom alone is immortal.
As quoted in Dictionary of Quotations (Classical) (1906), edited by Thomas Benfield Harbottle, p. 495.
To Demonicus

Wisdom, Travel, Understanding, Time

“I believe in you and me. I'm like Albert Schweitzer and Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein in that I have a respect for life – in any form. I believe in nature, in the birds, the sea, the sky, in everything I can see or that there is real evidence for. If these things are what you mean by God, then I believe in God. But I don't believe in a personal God to whom I look for comfort or for a natural on the next roll of the dice.”

Frank Sinatra (1915–1998) American singer and film actor

Playboy interview (1963)

Life, God, Nature, Bird

“Let there be light! said Liberty,
And like sunrise from the sea,
Athens arose!”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Hellas

Source: Hellas (1821), l. 682

Light

“At night I sit in my chamber and read the Bible. Far in the distance roars the sea. Then I lie down and think for a long time about the calm and pale man from Nazareth.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Abends sitze ich auf meinem Zimmer und lese die Bibel. In der Ferne braust das Meer. Dann liege ich noch lange wach und denke an den stillen, bleichen Mann von Nazareth.
Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

Lie, Thinking, Time, Reading

“At Bishop they learn'd that Dixon had been buried in back of the Quaker Meeting-House in Staindrop. Doctor Isaac stay'd with his Father, step for step. At the grave, which by Quaker custom was unmark'd, Mason beseech'd what dismally little he knew of God, to help Dixon through. The grass was long and beaded with earlier rain. A Cat emerg'd from it and star'd for a long time, appearing to know them.
"Dad?" Doc had taken his arm. For an instant, unexpectedly, Mason saw the little Boy who, having worried about Storms at Sea, as Beasts in the Forest, came running each time to make sure his father had return'd safely, — whose gift of ministering to others Mason was never able to see, let alone accept, in his blind grieving, his queasiness of Soul before a life and a death, his refusal to touch the Baby, tho' 'twas not possible to blame him…. The Boy he had gone to the other side of the Globe to avoid was looking at him now with nothing in his face but concern for his Father.
"Oh, Son."”

Thomas Pynchon Mason & Dixon

He shook his Head. He didn't continue.
"It's your Mate," Doctor Isaac assur'd him, "It's what happens when your Mate dies."
Mason & Dixon (1997)

Life, Death, God, Soul

“Patel's presidential address to the Congress, 1931: No one would die of starvation in independent India. Its grain would not be exported. Cloth would not be imported by it. Its leaders would neither use a foreign language nor rule from a remote place 7,000 feet above sea level. Its military expenditure would not be heavy. Its army would not subjugate its own people or other lands. Its best-paid officials would not earn a great deal more than its lowest-paid servants. And finding justice in it would be neither costly nor difficult.”

Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (1875–1950) Indian freedom fighter who forged united India

Gandhi, Rajmohan. Patel: A Life, p. 92

People, Justice, Clothes

“No voice divine the storm allay'd,
No light propitious shone;
When, snatch'd from all effectual aid,
We perish'd, each alone;
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelmed in deeper gulphs than he.”

William Cowper The Castaway

"The Castaway" (1799).

Light

“Like rose-hued sea-flowers toward the heat,
They stretch and spread and wink
Their ten soft buds that part and meet.”

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic

Étude Réaliste.
Undated

Flowers, Parting

“I remember in the winter of 1945–46 cycling by myself along an open road near Muttra, when a young Brahmin drew alongside me and after some conversation in Urdu between us, pointed to his home some hundred yards from the road and suggested I go there with him for a drink of water. While my hosts used a brass vessel, I drank from a rough earthen tumbler, which, on thanking them and taking my leave, I smashed on the ground to show that I knew it could not anyhow be used again. 'He is a Hindu,' they said to one another with a smile. There is a sense in which it had been true: the British were married to India, as Venice was married to the sea.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

'A complex fate', The Spectator (6 April 1974), p. 12
1970s

Smile, Home, Drink, Sense

“The sea returns upon the men,
The fields entrap the children, brick
Is a weed and all the flies are caught,
Wingless and withered, but living alive.
The discord merely magnified.
Deeper within the belly's dark
Of time, time grows upon the rock.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)

Men, Children, Time

“Let the Turks now carry away their abuses, in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province that they have desolated and profaned. This thorough riddance, this most blessed deliverance, is the only reparation we can make to those heaps and heaps of dead, the violated purity alike of matron and of maiden and of child; to the civilization which has been affronted and shamed; to the laws of God, or, if you like, of Allah; to the moral sense of mankind at large. There is not a criminal in a European jail, there is not a criminal in the South Sea Islands, whose indignation would not rise and over-boil at the recital of that which has been done, which has too late been examined, but which remains unavenged, which has left behind all the foul and all the fierce passions which produced it and which may again spring up in another murderous harvest from the soil soaked and reeking with blood and in the air tainted with every imaginable deed of crime and shame. That such things should be done once is a damning disgrace to the portion of our race which did them; that the door should be left open to their ever so barely possible repetition would spread that shame over the world!”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

1870s

God, World, Law, Hope

“Not only was there a layer of ice above the atmosphere, the Bible teaches that the earth also had a layer of water UNDER the crust of the earth. The earth’s crust today is about 10-25 miles thick. Many who have studied this topic agree that the earth had huge reservoirs of water maybe ten miles down, when the earth was first created. Psalm 24:1-2, “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein. For He hath founded it UPON the seas, and established it UPON the floods..””

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Was the earth founded on the water? Psalm 136:6 tells us that God “stretched out the earth ABOVE the waters.”
Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 46

God, World, Study, Water

“Winter Light — suppose we discuss that now?… The film is closely connected with a particular piece of music: Stravinski's A Psalm Symphony. I heard it on the radio one morning during Easter, and it struck me I'd like to make a film about a solitary church on the plains of Uppland. Someone goes into the church, locks himself in, goes up to the altar, and says: 'God, I'm staying here until in one way or another You've proved to me You exist. This is going to be the end either of You or of me!' Originally the film was to have been about the days and nights lived through by this solitary person in the locked church, getting hungrier and hungrier, thirstier and thirstier, more and more expectant, more and more filled with his own experiences, his visions, his dreams, mixing up dream and reality, while he's involved in this strange, shadowy wrestling match with God.
We were staying out on Toro, in the Stockholm archipelago. It was the first summer I'd had the sea all around me. I wandered about on the shore and went indoors and wrote, and went out again. The drama turned into something else; into something altogether tangible, something perfectly real, elementary and self-evident.
The film is based on something I'd actually experienced. Something a clergyman up in Dalarna told me: the story of the suicide, the fisherman Persson. One day the clergyman had tried to talk to him; the next, Persson had hanged himself. For the clergyman it was a personal catastrophe.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

Jonas Sima interview 
Bergman on Bergman (1970)

God, Dreams, Music, Way

“The words that reverberate for us at the confines of this long adventure of rebellion are not formulas for optimism, for which we have no possible use in the extremities of our unhappiness, but words of courage and intelligence which, on the shores of the eternal seas, even have the qualities of virtue.”

Albert Camus book The Rebel

The Rebel (1951)

Intelligence, Courage, Optimism

“The title [of an album with prints of Israels and poems after his pictures, made by Nicolaas Beets ] will not be I hope 'Kroost der zee' ['Offspring of the Sea']. I think this is an insufferable dissonance. Call it 'Sketches from Fisher's life - of B to J.' I think that is the best, the simplest and the most attractive name. Also the word 'to' gives me justice, otherwise people will think that I made them [his pictures] after Beets and not Beets [his poems] after me.”

Jozef Israëls (1824–1911) Dutch painter

translation from the original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek
version in original Dutch (citaat van Jozef Israëls in Nederlands): De titel [van een album met prenten van Israels en gedichten daarop van nl:Nicolaas Beets ] zal toch hoop ik niet zijn, 'Kroost der zee'.- zulks vind ik van een onuitstaanbare wanklank laat het heeten 'schetsen uit het visschersleven van B naar J. ' dat vind ik de beste eenvoudigste en meest aantrekkelijke naam. Tevens het woordje 'naar' doet mij regt, daar anders men meenen zoude dat ik ze naar Beets en niet Beets naar mij gemaakt heeft.
Quote in his letter to publisher A.C. Kruseman in The Hague, 1861; as cited in LTK 1390 nr. 11, University Library of Leiden
the compromise between Beets and Israëls became 'The Children of the Sea'; the album was published in four episodes, the first on 7 June, 1861
Quotes of Jozef Israels, 1840 - 1870

Life, People, Justice, Hope

“willow of crystal, a poplar of water,
a pillar of fountain by the wind drawn over,
tree that is firmly rooted and that dances,
turning course of a river that goes curving,
advances and retreats, goes roundabout,
arriving forever:
the calm course of a star
or the spring, appearing without urgency,
water behind a stillness of closed eyelids
flowing all night and pouring out prophecies,
a single presence in the procession of waves
wave over wave until all is overlapped,
in a green sovereignty without decline
a bright hallucination of many wings
when they all open at the height of the sky, course of a journey among the densities
of the days of the future and the fateful
brilliance of misery shining like a bird
that petrifies the forest with its singing
and the annunciations of happiness
among the branches which go disappearing,
hours of light even now pecked away by the birds,
omens which even now fly out of my hand, an actual presence like a burst of singing,
like the song of the wind in a burning building,
a long look holding the whole world suspended,
the world with all its seas and all its mountains,
body of light as it is filtered through agate,
the thighs of light, the belly of light, the bays,
the solar rock and the cloud-colored body,
color of day that goes racing and leaping,
the hour glitters and assumes its body,
now the world stands, visible through your body,
and is transparent through your transparency”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

Sun Stone (1957)

Fate, Happiness, World, Color

“The light that never was, on sea or land,
The consecration, and the poet's dream.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Elegiac Stanzas. Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm, st. 4 (1805).

Dreams, Light

“I have pleaded for the rights of woman, for the rights of wives, and what is more, for the rights of little children. I have said that they could be governed by affection, by love, and that my heart went out to all the children of poverty and of crime; to the children that live in the narrow streets and in the sub-cellars; to the children that run and hide when they hear the footsteps of a brutal father, the children that grow pale when they hear their names pronounced even by a mother; to all the little children, the flotsam and jetsam upon the wide, rude sea of life. I have said that my heart goes out to them one and all; I have asked fathers and mothers to cease beating their own flesh and blood. I have said to them, When your child does wrong, put your arms around him; let him feel your heart beat against his. It is easier to control your child with a kiss than with a club.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

My Reviewers Reviewed (lecture from June 27, 1877, San Francisco, CA)

Love, Life, Children, Feeling

“It cannot be said that at the time these inscriptions were set up at ANhilwãD Pãtan, Prabhas Patan, Khambat, Junagadh and other places, the Hindus of Gujarat had had no taste of what Islam had in store for them, their women, their children, their cities, their temples, their idols, their priests, and their properties. The invasion of Ulugh Khãn that was to subjugate Gujarat to a long spell of Muslim rule, was the eighth in a series which started within a few years after the Prophet’s death at Medina in AD 632. Five Islamic invasions had been mounted on Gujarat before Siddharãja JayasiMha ascended the throne of that kingdom in AD 1094 - first in AD 636 on Broach by sea; second in AD 732-35 by land; third and fourth in AD 756 and 776 by sea; and fifth by Mahmûd of Ghazni in AD 1026. Two others had materialised by the time the Muslim ship-owner set up his inscription in AD 1264 on a mosque at Prabhas Patan. The sixth invasion was by Muhammad Ghûrî in AD 1178, and the seventh was by Qutbu’d-Dîn Aibak in AD 1197. The only conclusion that can be drawn from the evidence is that either the Hindus of Gujarat had a very short memory or that they did not understand at all the inspiration at the back of these invasions. The temple of Somnath which stood, after the invasion of Mahmûd of Ghazni in AD 1026, as a grim reminder of the character of Islam, had also failed to teach them any worthwhile lesson. Nor did they visualize that the Muslim settlements in their midst could play a role other than that of carrying on trade and commerce.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume II (1993)

Death, Women, Children, Understanding

“For whosoever commands the sea commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.”

Walter Raleigh (1554–1618) English aristocrat, writer, poet, soldier, courtier, spy, and explorer

A Discourse of the Invention of Ships, Anchors, Compass, &c

World

“I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,
As she dances about the sun.
I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under,
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley The Cloud

St. 1
The Cloud (1820)

Dreams, Flowers, Light, Sun

“Next door, the TV's flashingblue frames on the wall.It's a comedy from the seventieswith a lead no one recalls.He vanished into oblivionit's easy to doand I cried a sea when you talked to methe day you said we were through.But it's all right, some enchanted nightI'll be with you<BR”

Elliott Smith (1969–2003) American singer-songwriter

Miss Misery (Early version).
Lyrics, New Moon (posthumous, 2007)

“Male penguins are unfaithful up to an advanced age, a phenomenon sometimes attributed to the sea air.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Penguin
How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes (1931)

Age, Unfaithfulness

“What is peddled about nowadays as philosophy, especially that of N. S. [National Socialism], but has nothing to do with the inner truth and greatness of that movement [namely the encounter between global technology and modern humanity] is nothing but fishing in that troubled sea of values and totalities.”

Martin Heidegger book Introduction to Metaphysics

Introduction to Metaphysics (1953) — a publication of lectures of 1935.

Truth, Fish

“Arms, and the man I sing, who, forced by Fate,
And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate,
Expell'd and exil'd, left the Trojan shore;
Long labours both by sea and land he bore.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

Aeneis, Book I, lines 1–4.
The Works of Virgil (1697)

Hate, Fate, Singing

“Of Christian souls more have been wrecked on shore
Than ever were lost at sea.”

Charles Henry Webb (1834–1905) American poet

With a Nantucket Shell, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Soul

“Old England is our home, and Englishmen are we;
Our tongue is known in every clime, our flag in every sea.”

Mary Howitt (1799–1888) English poet, and author

Old England is our Home, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Home

“The wind was a torrent of darkness upon the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight looping the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding —
Riding — riding —
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn door.”

Alfred Noyes book The Highwayman

The Highwayman (1907)

Tree

“Starting tomorrow, I'll be carefree and happy
Roaming the world, feeding my horse, chopping firewood
Starting tomorrow, I'll need nothing but rice and a few vegetables
In my house by the sea, warmed by the spring air”

Hai Zi (1964–1989) Chinese poet

《面朝大海，春暖花开》 ("Looking out to sea, warmed by the spring air"), trans. John Sexton http://www.china.org.cn/chinese/2011-02/01/content_26146460.htm.

Happiness, World, Spring, Horse

“Was that, too, destined to thrive awhile and decay and vanish, and be replaced by another, Nortekku wondered? Probably. The earth changes, he thought. Mountains rise, are ground to dust, give way to plains and valleys. Shorelines are drowned; new islands are thrust upward out of the sea. Civilizations are born, die, are forgotten. The planet alone abides, and all that dwells upon it is transient.
Contemplating these things, he felt much the richer for all his freshly acquired knowledge. He felt that for the first time he comprehended, at least some small way, the great chain of existence, stretching across time from misty past to unborn future.”

Robert Silverberg (1935) American speculative fiction writer and editor

Source: Short fiction, A Piece of the Great World (2005), p. 80

Way, Mountain, Knowledge, Change

“I’d rather die at sea, with one deep gulp of death,
than die by inches on this desolate island here!”

Homér The Odyssey (Cowper)

XII. 351–352 (tr. Robert Fagles).
Odyssey (c. 725 BC)

Death

“And they say that after people make love there's a kind of melancholia that descends; la petite mort, you know, the little death. Well, I'm here to tell you, after a romantic night in with yourself, there's a very acute sensation of failed suicide. And I think a lot of that, if you're men is because of the quality of the gear you've got to work with. I mean it's horrible looking. Like a deep sea fish that ate its own arse after about an hour. What's going on down there?! Do something nice, like a kittens head… or something and you could just tickle its chin until it got sick… it would be alright…”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

On masturbation.
Monster (2004)

Love, Death, Men, People

“Any individual who is sincerely searching for God, on land or in the sea is also worthy of respect.”

Riaz Ahmed Gohar Shahi (1941–2001) Pakistani Sufi spiritual leader, poet, author

An introduction to this book
The Religion of God (2000)

God, Search, Sincerity

“I had to tell him quite plainly that the Belgians had lost only 16,000 men in the war, and that, when all was said, Belgium had not made greater sacrifices than Great Britain. The truth is that we are always called upon to foot the bill. When anything has to be done it is "Old England" that has to do it. If the Rumanians have to be supplied with food and credits have to be given, in the final result England has to stand the racket. It is time that we again told the world what we have done. These things tend to be forgotten. Our policy is quite clear but imperfectly understood. We mean that the French shall have coal in the Saar Valley and that the Poles shall have access to the sea through Danzig; but we don't want to create a condition of affairs that will be likely to lead to another war. We don't want to place millions of Germans under the domination of the French and the Poles. That would not be for their benefit, and what is the use of setting up a lot of Alsace-Lorraines?”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Quoted in Lord Riddell's diary entry (31 March 1919), J. M. McEwen (ed.), The Riddell Diaries 1908-1923 (London: The Athlone Press, 1986), pp. 263-264
Prime Minister

Men, War, Truth, World

“The Allied airborne operation in Sicily was decisive despite widely scattered drops which must be expected in a night landing. It is my opinion that if it had not been for the Allied airborne forces (82nd) blocking the Hermann Goering Armd. Div. from reaching the beachhead, that division would have driven the initial seaborne forces back into the sea. I attribute the entire success of the Allied Sicilian Operation to the delaying of German reserves (by the 82nd ABN Div.) until sufficient forces had been landed by sea to resist the counterattacks by our defending forces, the strength of which had been held in mobile reserve.”

Kurt Student (1890–1978) German Luftwaffe general during World War II

Quoted in "Airlift Doctrine" - Page 88 - by Charles E. Miller - History - 1988.

Decision, Success, Night

“Wandering through many countries and over many seas I come, my brother, to these sorrowful obsequies, to present you with the last guerdon of death, and speak, though in vain, to your silent ashes, since fortune has taken your own self away from me—alas, my brother, so cruelly torn from me! Yet now meanwhile take these offerings, which by the custom of our fathers have been handed down—a sorrowful tribute—for a funeral sacrifice; take them, wet with many tears of a brother, and for ever, my brother, hail and farewell!”
Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus Advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias, Ut te postremo donarem munere mortis Et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem. Quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum, Heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi, Nunc tamen interea haec prisco quae more parentum Tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias, Accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu, Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.

Gaio Valerio Catullo list of poems by Catullus

CI, lines 1–10
Sir William Marris's translation:
By many lands and over many a wave
I come, my brother, to your piteous grave,
To bring you the last offering in death
And o'er dumb dust expend an idle breath;
For fate has torn your living self from me,
And snatched you, brother, O, how cruelly!
Yet take these gifts, brought as our fathers bade
For sorrow's tribute to the passing shade;
A brother's tears have wet them o'er and o'er;
And so, my brother, hail, and farewell evermore!
Carmina

Death, Tear, Country

“Two lovers, here at the corner, by the steeple,
Two lovers blow together like music blowing:
And the crowd dissolves about them like a sea.
Recurring waves of sound break vaguely about them,
They drift from wall to wall, from tree to tree.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

Music, Lovers, Tree

“Though it lash the shallows that line the beach,
Afar from the great sea-deeps,
There is never a storm whose might can reach
Where the vast leviathan sleeps.
Like a mighty thought in a mighty mind
In the clear cold depths he swims;
Whilst above him the pettiest form of his kind
With a dash o'er the surface skims.”

John Boyle O'Reilly (1844–1890) Irish-born poet and novelist

Prelude to the amber whale.

Sleep

“On September 16, 1978, there was an eclipse of the moon in Riyadh. Late one afternoon it became visible: a dark shadow moving slowly across the face of the pale moon in the darkening blue sky. There was a frantic knocking on the door. When I opened it, our neighbor asked if we were safe. He said it was the Day of Judgement, when the Quran says the sun will rise from the west and the seas will flood, when all the dead will rise and Allah's angels will weigh our sins and virtue, expediting the good to Paradise and the bad to Hell. Though it was barely twilight, the muezzin suddenly called for prayer--not one mosque calling carefully after another, as they usually did, but all the mosques clamoring all at once, all over the city. There was shouting across the neighborhood. When I looked outside I saw people praying in the street.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali book Infidel

Source: Infidel (2007), Ch. 3

People, Angels, Hell, Sun

“Painting is the magic art, the fire set alight on the windows of the rich dwelling, as on those of the humble hovel, from the last rays of the setting sun, it is the long mark, the humid mark, the fluent and still mark that the dying wave etches on the hot sand, it is the darting of the immortal lizard on the rock burnt by the midday heat, it is the rainbow of conciliation, on sad May afternoons, after the storm has passed, down there, making a dark backdrop to the almond trees in flower, to the gardens with their washed colours, to the ploughmen's huts, smiling and tranquil, it is the livid cloud chased by the vehement blowing of Aeolus enraged, it is the nebulous disk of the fleeting moon behind the ripped-open funereal curtain of a disturbed sky in the deep of night, it is the blood of the bull stabbed in the arena, of the warrior fallen in the heat of battle, of Adonis' immaculate thigh wounded by the obstinate boar's curved tusk, it is the sail swollen with the winds of distant seas, it is the centuries-old tree browned in the autumn..”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

Quote from the first lines in De Cirico's essay 'Painting', 1938; from http://www.fondazionedechirico.org/wp-content/uploads/211_Painting_1938_Metaphysical_Art.pdf 'Painting', 1938 - G. de Chirico, presentation to the catalogue of his solo exhibition Mostra personale del pittore Giorgio de Chirico, Galleria Rotta, Genoa, May 1938], p. 211
1920s and later

Sadness, Smile, Art, Flowers

“We can dive to the bottom of the sea and some say NASA will fly us to the stars, and I have known men to plunge into the past—or the future—and drown. But there's one place where we can't go. We can't go where we are already. We can't go home, because our minds, and our hearts, and our immortal souls are already there there.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

"Kevin Malone", New Terrors (1980), ed. Ramsey Campbell, Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Endangered Species (1989), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009)
Fiction

Men, Home, Soul, Star

“Prosperity doth bewitch men, seeming clear;
But seas do laugh, show white, when rocks are near.”

John Webster The White Devil

Act V, scene vi.
The White Devil (1612)

Men

“Such was the man who was sent on an embassy to Ajmir, in order that the Rai (Pithaura) of that country might see the right way without the intervention of the sword, and that he might incline from the track of opposition into the path of propriety, leaving his airy follies for the institutes of the knowledge of Allah, and acknowledging the expediency of uttering the words of martyrdom and repeating the precepts of the law, and might abstain from infidelity and darkness, which entails the loss of this world and that to come, and might place in his ear the ring of slavery to the sublime Court (may Allah exalt it!) which is the centre of justice and mercy, and the pivot of the Sultans of the worldand by these means and modes might cleanse the fords of good life from the sins of impurity'…'The army of Islam was completely victorious, and 'an hundred thousand grovelling Hindus swiftly departed to the fire of hell'… After this great victory, the army of Islam marched forward to Ajmir, where it arrived at a fortunate moment and under an auspicious bird, and obtained so much booty and wealth, that you might have said that the secret depositories of the seas and hills had been revealed….'While the Sultan remained at Ajmir, he destroyed the pillars and foundations of the idol temples, and built in their stead mosques and colleges, and the precepts of Islam, and the customs of the law were divulged and established”

Muhammad of Ghor (1160–1206) Ghurid Sultan

About the conquest of Ajmer (Rajasthan) Hasan Nizami: Taju’l-Ma’sir, in Elliot and Dowson, Vol. II : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. pp. 213-216. Also quoted (in part) in Jain, Meenakshi (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts.

Life, Secret, World, Justice

“A sillie swaine, passing over an arm of the sea with his seede corne in a sacke, by mischance at the landing, his sacke fell into the water, and so his corne being lefte there till the next low water, became somewhat brackish, yet such was the necessity of the man, as that he (notwithstanding hee was out of all hope to have any good successe thereby, yet not being able to buie any other) bestowed the same wheat upon his plowed groundes, by the advice of a gentleman of good worship from whence I received the report thereof, and in June when the harvest time came about, he reaped a rich crop of goodly wheat such as in that yeare not any of his neighbours had the like, and yet notwithstanding (for aught that ever I could yet learne) neither he nor any other of his countrimen would ever adventure to make any further use thereof, belike being perswaded, unless that the corne by chance fell into the sea, it would never fructifie.”

Hugh Plat (1552–1608) writer

As cited in: Robert Kemp Philp (1859, p. 74)
The Jewell House of Art and Nature, 1594

Hope, Learning, Water, Chance

“Blessed in sleep and satisfied to languish, to embrace shadows, and to pursue the summer breeze, I swim through a sea that has no floor or shore, I plow the waves and found my house on sand and write on the wind.”

Francesco Petrarca Il Canzoniere

Beato in sogno et di languir contento,
d'abbracciar l'ombre et seguir l'aura estiva,
nuoto per mar che non à fondo o riva,
solco onde, e 'n rena fondo, et scrivo in vento.
Canzone 212, st. 1
Il Canzoniere (c. 1351–1353), To Laura in Life

Sleep, Summer, Housing

“So our lives glide on: the river ends we don't know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.”

George Eliot book Felix Holt, the Radical

Source: Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Chapter 27 (at page 219)

“What a wonderful and amazing Scheme have we here of the magnificent Vastness of the Universe! So many Suns, so many Earths, and every one of them stock’d with so many Herbs, Trees and Animals, and adorn’d with so many Seas and Mountains! And how must our wonder and admiration be encreased when we consider the prodigious distance and multitude of the Stars?”

Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) Dutch mathematician and natural philosopher

Quam mirabilis igitur, quamque stupenda mundi amplitudo, & magnificentia jam mente concipienda est. Tot Soles, tot Terrae atque harum unaquaeque tot herbis, arboribus, animalibus, tot maribus, montibusque exornata. Et erit etiam unde augeatur admiratio, si quis ea quae de fixarum Stellarum distantia, & multitudine hisce addimus, pependerit. <br class="br"> Book 2 http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~gent0113/huygens/huygens_ct_en.htm, pp. 150-151 <br class="br">Cosmotheoros (1695; publ. 1698)

Mountain, Star, Tree, Universe

“Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles.”

Emma Lazarus (1849–1887) American poet

The New Colossus http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_New_Colossus

“Every ship from the New World came freighted with marvels which put the fictions of chivalry to shame; and to the Spaniard of that day America was a region of wonder and mystery, of vague and magnificent promise. Thither adventurers hastened, thirsting for glory and for gold, and often mingling the enthusiasm of the crusader and the valor of the knight-errant with the bigotry of inquisitors and the rapacity of pirates. They roamed over land and sea; they climbed unknown mountains, surveyed unknown oceans, pierced the sultry intricacies of tropical forests; while from year to year and from day to day new wonders were unfolded, new islands and archipelagoes, new regions of gold and pearl, and barbaric empires of more than Oriental wealth. The extravagance of hope and the fever of adventure knew no bounds.”

Francis Parkman (1823–1893) American historian

Pt. I, Ch. 1 Early Spanish Adventure
Pioneers of France in the New World (1865)

World, Hope, Mountain, Wealth

“When Heracles was quite a young man and was nearly of the age at which you yourselves are now, while he was deliberating which of the two roads he should take, the one leading through toils to virtue, or the easiest, two women approached him, and these were Virtue and Vice. Now at once, although they were silent, the difference between them was evident from their appearance. For the one had been decked out for beauty through the art of toiletry, and was overflowing with voluptuousness, and she was leading a whole swarm of pleasures in her train; now these things she displayed, and promising still more than these she tried to draw Heracles to her. But the other was withered and squalid, and had an intense look, and spoke quite differently; for she promised nothing dissolute or pleasant, but countless sweating toils and labours and dangers through every land and sea. But the prize to be won by these was to become a god, as the narrative of Prodicus expressed it; and it was this second woman that Heracles in the end followed.”

Basil of Caesarea (329–379) Christian Saint

Source: On Greek Literature, p. 399

Women, God, Pleasure, Age

“Of this Shakspeare of ours, perhaps the opinion one sometimes hears a little idolatrously expressed is, in fact, the right one; I think the best judgement not of this country only, but of Europe at large, is slowly pointing to the conclusion, That Shakspeare is the chief of all Poets hitherto; the greatest intellect who, in our recorded world, has left record of himself in the way of Literature. On the whole, I know not such a power of vision, such a faculty of thought, if we take all the characters of it, in any other man. Such a calmness of depth; placid joyous strength; all things imaged in that great soul of his so true and clear, as in a tranquil unfathomable sea!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Poet

World, Way, Soul, Literature

“Be not cast down. If ye saw Him who is standing on the shore, holding out His arms to welcome you to land, ye would wade, not only through a sea of wrongs, but through hell itself to be with Him.”

Samuel Rutherford (1600–1661) Scottish Reformed theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 253.

Hell

“We may not appreciate the fact; but a fact nevertheless it remains: we are living in a Golden Age, the most gilded Golden Age of human history — not only of past history, but of future history. For, as Sir Charles Darwin and many others before him have pointed out, we are living like drunken sailors, like the irresponsible heirs of a millionaire uncle. At an ever accelerating rate we are now squandering the capital of metallic ores and fossil fuels accumulated in the earth’s crust during hundreds of millions of years. How long can this spending spree go on? Estimates vary. But all are agreed that within a few centuries or at most a few millennia, Man will have run through his capital and will be compelled to live, for the remaining nine thousand nine hundred and seventy or eighty centuries of his career as Homo sapiens, strictly on income. Sir Charles is of the opinion that Man will successfully make the transition from rich ores to poor ores and even sea water, from coal, oil, uranium and thorium to solar energy and alcohol derived from plants. About as much energy as is now available can be derived from the new sources — but with a far greater expense in man hours, a much larger capital investment in machinery. And the same holds true of the raw materials on which industrial civilization depends. By doing a great deal more work than they are doing now, men will contrive to extract the diluted dregs of the planet’s metallic wealth or will fabricate non-metallic substitutes for the elements they have completely used up. In such an event, some human beings will still live fairly well, but not in the style to which we, the squanderers of planetary capital, are accustomed.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

"Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" in Adonis and the Alphabet (1956); later in Collected Essays (1959), p. 293

Men, Alcohol, Age, History

“From where I stand, I do not see the lost people of the South Seas, the defeated and the despairing, shrunken shadows of those who went before. What I observe are the proud descendants of some of the most remarkable explorers and settlers who ever lived. We carry the cultural and historical inheritance of ocean navigators of peerless skill and their courageous kin who crossed vast distances before the tribes of Europe had ventured forth from their small part of the earth. Our forebearers populated islands scattered over the world's greatest stretch of water, covering a fifth of the planet's surface. It was one of the most amazing migrations in history, a triumphant testimony to human endurance, fortitude and achievement.”

Kamisese Mara (1920–2004) President of Fiji

Opening address, Pacific Vision festival, Auckland, New Zealand (26 July 1999) http://www.minpac.govt.nz/resources/reference/pvdocs/opening/mara.php.

People, World, History, Courage

“I am not one to advocate the reducing of our navy in any degree below that proportion to the French navy which the exigencies of our service require; and, mind what I say, here is just what the French Government would admit as freely as you would. England has four times, at least, the amount of mercantile tonnage to protect at sea that France has, and that surely gives us a legitimate pretension to have a larger navy than France. Besides, this country is an island; we cannot communicate with any part of the world except by sea. France, on the other hand, has a frontier upon land, by which she can communicate with the whole world. We have, I think, unfortunately for ourselves, about a hundred times the amount of territory beyond the seas to protect, as colonies and dependencies, that France has. France has also twice or three times as large an army as England had. All these things give us a right to have a navy somewhat in the proportion to the French navy which we find to have existed if we look back over the past century. Nobody has disputed it. I would be the last person who would ever advocate any undue change in this proportion. On the contrary—I have said it in the House of Commons, and I repeat it to you—if the French Government showed a sinister design to increase their navy to an equality with ours; then, after every explanation to prevent such an absurd waste, I should vote 100 millions sterling rather than allow that navy to be increased to a level with ours—because I should say that any attempt of that sort without any legitimate grounds, would argue some sinister design upon this country.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech in Rochdale (26 June 1861), quoted in John Bright and J. E. Thorold Rogers (eds.), Speeches on Questions of Public Policy by Richard Cobden, M.P. Volume II (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908), pp. 433-4.
1860s

World, Communication, Thinking, Change

“Judgment is more than skill. It sets forth on intellectual seas beyond the shores of hard indisputable factual information.”

Kingman Brewster, Jr. (1919–1988) American diplomat

Address at University of Exeter (26 October 1978)

“In the whole range of earthly experience, no quality is more attractive and ennobling than moral courage. Like that mountain of rock which towers aloft in the Irish Sea, the man possessed of this principle is unmoved by the swelling surges which fret and fume at his feet. And yet, unlike that same Ailsa Craig, he is sensitive beyond measure to every adverse influence — battling against it, and triumphing over it by a power which proceeds from God's throne, and pervades his entire being.”

John McClellan Holmes (1834–1911) US Christian minister and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 165.

God, Mountain, Courage

“So that being with Law-Suites, and Riots, wearied and disabled to prosecute his Art and. Invention at present, even until the first Patent was extinct: Nothwithstanding the Author his sad. Sufferings, Imprisonments wrongfully for several thousand pound in the Counter in London, yet did obtaine a new Patent, dated the 2d of May, Anno 14. Caroli Primi of ever Blessed Memory, not only for the making of Iron into cast-works, and bars, but also for the Melting, Extracting, Refing and Reducing of all Mines, Minerals and. Mettals, with Pit-cole, Sea-cole, Peat, and Turf, for the preservation of Wood and Timber of this Island; into which Patent, the Author, for the better support and management of his Invention, so much opposed formerly at the Court, at the Parliament, and at the Law, took in David Ramasey, Esquire, Resident at the Court; Sir George Horsey, at the Parliament; Roger Foulke, Esquire, a Counsellour of the Temple, and an Ingenious Man; and also an Iron Master, my Neighbour, and one who did well know my former Sufferings, and what I had done in the Invention of making of Iron with Pit-cole, etc.”

Dud Dudley (1600–1684) British metallurgist

Source: Metallum Martis, 1665, p. 16-17

Sadness, Law, Art, Support

“The form of a coast, the configuration of the interior of a country, the existence and extent of lakes, valleys, and mountains, can often be traced to the former prevalence of earthquakes and volcanoes in regions which have long been undisturbed. To these remote convulsions the present fertility of some districts the sterile character of others, the elevation of land above the sea, the climate, and various peculiarities, may be distinctly referred.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.1, p. 2
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

Mountain, Country

“As two floating planks meet and part on the sea,
O friend! so I met and then drifted from thee.”

William R. Alger (1822–1905) American clergyman and poet

"The Brief Chance Encounter", p. 196.
Poetry of the Orient, 1865 edition

Parting

“We are told by a Lord of the Admiralty who represents a Sheffield division that it is all over with the old Manchester school, and that we have got into new days. I do not belong to the Manchester school. I have nothing to say about the Manchester school except this— that I chanced to write the life of a very important leader of that school. and what did Mr. Cobden say upon this very point? He said:—"I am willing to spend a hundred millions on the fleet if necessary". The Radical party have never been the party who denied the great proposition that lies at the bottom of British politics— namely, that we must have absolute supremacy at sea.”

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) British Liberal statesman, writer and newspaper editor

Speech a Liberal demonstration in Sheffield (22 January 1889), quoted in 'Mr. Morley At Sheffield', The Times (23 January 1889), p. 10.

Life, School, Chance

“For ourselves, we firmly believe that the finger of Providence is pointing the way to all races, and colors, and nations, along the path that is to lead the east and the west alike to the great goal of human wants. Demons infest that path, and numerous and unhappy are the wanderings of millions who stray from its course; sometimes in reluctance to proceed; sometimes in an indiscreet haste to move faster than their fellows, and always in a forgetfulness of the great rules of conduct that have been handed down from above. Nevertheless, the main course is onward; and the day, in the sense of time, is not distant, when the whole earth is to be filled with the knowledge of the Lord, "as the waters cover the sea.
One of the great stumbling-blocks with a large class of well-meaning, but narrow-judging moralists, are the seeming wrongs that are permitted by Providence, in its control of human events. Such persons take a one-sided view of things, and reduce all principles to the level of their own understandings. If we could comprehend the relations which the Deity bears to us, as well as we can comprehend the relations we bear to him, there might be a little seeming reason in these doubts; but when one of the parties in this mighty scheme of action is a profound mystery to the other, it is worse than idle, it is profane, to attempt to explain those things which our minds are not yet sufficiently cleared from the dross of earth to understand.”

James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) American author

Preface
Oak Openings or The bee-hunter (1848)

Color, Way, Understanding, Knowledge

“I do believe we are going to have a major war, with Japan and Germany, and that the war is going to start by a very serious surprise attack and defeat of U. S. armed forces, and that there is going to be a major revulsion on the part of the political power in Washington against all those in command at sea, and they are going to be thrown out, though it won't be their fault necessarily. And I wish to be in a position of sufficient prominence so that I will then be considered as one to be sent to sea, because that appears to be the route.”

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

On his expectations of war, and that he would someday become the Chief of Naval Operations, in a conversation during the mid 1930s with his son, Chester W. Nimitz, Jr.; as quoted in Nimitz (1976) by E. B. Potter. ISBN 0870214926

War, Appearance, Parting

“The ages roll
Forward; and forward with them draw my soul
Into Time’s infinite sea.
And to be glad or sad I care no more;
But to have done and to have been before
I cease to do and be!”

Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton (1831–1891) English statesman and poet

The Wanderer, Book iv, Stanza 9, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Age, Sadness, Soul, Time

“Today's American bemoans the extermination of the passenger pigeon and the threatened extinction of the whooping crane and the ivory billed woodpecker; he contributes to conservation organizations that seek to preserve the Hawaiian goose, the sea otter of the Aleutian Islands, the lizard of the Galapágos Islands… But who ever shed a tear over the loss of the native American cultures?”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

1st edition
Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

Tear, Loss

“I, the ocean of mind, drink all creation’s waves.
The four veils of solid, liquid, vapor, light,
Lift aright.
Myself, in everything,
Enters the Great Myself.
Gone forever,
The fitful, flickering shadows of a mortal memory.
Spotless is my mental sky,
Below, ahead, and high above.
Eternity and I, one united ray.
I, a tiny bubble of laughter,
Have become the Sea of Mirth Itself.”

Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) Yogi, a guru of Kriya Yoga and founder of Self-Realization Fellowship

Songs of the Soul by Paramahansa Yogananda, Quotes drawn from the poem "Samadhi"

Drink, Laughter, Light, Memory

“The sea-road is good for wanderers and landless men. There is quenching of thirst on the grey paths of the winds, and the flying clouds to still the sting of lost dreams.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"The Road of Azrael" (1976)

Men, Dreams, Flying

“Colored men of Tennessee, humble and unworthy as I am, if no better shall be found I will indeed be your Moses and lead you through the Red Sea of war and bondage to a fairer future of liberty and peace. I speak now as one who feels the world his country and all who love equal rights his friends.”

Andrew Johnson (1808–1875) American politician, 17th president of the United States (in office from 1865 to 1869)

As quoted in "The Good Fight" https://archive.org/details/orationsandaddr03curtgoog (1865), by George William Curtis. <br class="br">Quote

Love, Men, War, World

“Two there on the beach / as close together as nostrils. / Calm sea day.”

Mirkka Rekola (1931–2014) Finnish writer

“There must be something strangely sacred about salt. It is in our tears and in the sea”

Khalil Gibran (1883–1931) Lebanese artist, poet, and writer

Sand and Foam (1926)

Tear

“But now, severed from the companion of my infancy, the partaker of all my thoughts, my cares, and my wishes, I was like one set afloat upon a stormy sea, hanging his safety upon a plank; night was closing upon him, and an unexpected surge had torn him from his hold and overwhelmed him forever.”

Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) American novelist, historian and editor

Wieland; or, the Transformation (1798)

Night

“Dominion by land or sea will appear equally destitute of attraction, when it comes to be generally understood, that all its advantages rest with the rulers, and that the subjects at large derive no benefit whatever.”

Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832) French economist and businessman

Source: A Treatise On Political Economy (Fourth Edition) (1832), Book III, On Consumption, Chapter VI, Section II, p. 431

Appearance

“He always thought of the sea as la mar, which is what people call her in spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her, but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fisherman, those who used buoys as floats for their lines or had motorboats bought when the shark lovers had much money, spoke of her as el mar, which is masculine, they spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine, as something that gave or withheld great favors. If she did wild or wicked things, it is because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

Love, Money, People, Lovers

“If the importation of foreign cattle, for example, were made ever so free, so few could be imported, that the grazing trade of Great Britain could be little affected by it. Live cattle are, perhaps, the only commodity of which the transportation is more expensive by sea than by land.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

Source: (1776), Book IV, Chapter II

“With whisper of her mellowing grain,
With treble of brook and bud and tree,
Earth joys for ever to sustain
The bass eternal of the sea.”

Roden Noel (1834–1894) English poet

"Beatrice", in Beatrice, and other Poems (1868).

Tree, Joy

“Wert thou all that I wish thee, great, glorious, and free,
First flower of the earth and first gem of the sea.”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

Remember Thee.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Flowers

“The expected effects of a sea-level rise typify the many consequences of a global warming. On the one hand, they are so big we literally can't understand them. If there is a significant polar melting, the Earth's center of gravity will shift, tipping the globe in such a way that the sea level might actually drop at Cape Horn and along the coast of Iceland—I read this in a recent EPA report and found that I didn't really understand what it meant to tip the Earth, through I was awed by the idea. On the other hand, the changes ultimately acquire a quite personal dimension: Should I put in a wall in front of my house? Does this taste salty to you? And, most telling of all, the human response to the problems, the utterly natural human attempt to preserve the old natural way of life in this postnatural world, creates entirely new consequences. The ocean rises; I build a wall; the marsh dies, and, with it, the fish.”

Bill McKibben book The End of Nature

Source: The End of Nature (1989), p. 117-118

Life, World, Way, Idea

“Nothing but Christian faith gives to the furthest future the solidity and definiteness which it must have if it is to be a breakwater for us against the fluctuating sea of present cares and thoughts.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 235.

Faith, Future

“Sweetie, if I’ve learned anything during my ten years at sea, it’s this. Never confuse your captain with God.”

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 4, “Dirge” (p. 74)

God, Learning

“There were long stretches where each of us was engaged in a private world of rapidly shifting vignettes. Always I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of human beings ebbing and flowing like the tides of the sea.”

Howard Thurman (1899–1981) American writer

Of a trip to India, in With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman (1979), p. 135 http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Aos1iJ9YfRwC&pg=PA135&dq=%22howard+thurman%22+india&hl=en&sa=X&ei=bmNeT47pDIqZ8QPJt9XvDg&ved=0CDwQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=%22howard%20thurman%22%20india&f=false

World