Quotes about the sea
page 18

“I laugh, for hope hath happy place with me;
If my bark sinks, 't is to another sea.”

William Ellery Channing (poet) (1818–1901) American writer

A Poet's Hope, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“Acquiring carnal knowledge is like swimming in the sea … The sea's so beautiful to look at, so wonderful to swim in, but you must never bathe unless it's safe. People so often drown in the sea and some coasts are so very dangerous, … like the Coast of Gower.”

Susan Howatch book The Wheel of Fortune

The Wheel of Fortune (1984), Part 1: Robert

People, Beauty, Knowledge

“Somehow his grandfather had wrought an honorable and glamorous life from the sea. But that era was gone. The system was dying. Advising a young man to join the United States Merchant Marine was like advising him to go into vaudeville.”

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 2, “Priest” (p. 44)

Life

“It's the standard contract. Gives you seven wishes in accordance with the mystic rules of life. Seven Days of the Week, Seven Deadly Sins, Seven Seas, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers…”

Peter Cook (1937–1995) British architect

Bedazzled (1967)

Life

“I’ve swum through some very cold and rough seas. I think that’s made me more determined than the average person.”

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

Website

Thinking, Personality

“If the Jewish state becomes a fact, and this is realized by the Arab peoples, they will drive the Jews who live in their midst into the sea.”

Hassan Banna (1906–1949) Egyptian politician

AIM TO OUST JEWS PLEDGED BY SHEIKH, New York Times, August 02, 1948 http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10E13FF385A157B93C0A91783D85F4C8485F9

People

“What kind of man takes a live bomb across the seas in order to blow up other people? People who have mothers and lovers and children, just like him?
Probably either a professional or a patriot, Alex thought. Or, worse, both.”

David Brin book Earth

Part IX (p. 524)
Earth (1990)

Children, People, Lovers

“Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.”
In tranquillo esse quisque gubernator potest.

Publilio Siro Latin writer

Maxim 358
Sentences

Leadership

“The explanation for capturing the vessel is perhaps to be found in Barroes’ remark: ‘It is true that there does exist a common right to all to navigate the seas and in Europe we recognize the rights which others hold against us; but the right does not extend beyond Europe and therefore the Portuguese as Lords of the Sea are justified in confiscating the goods of all those who navigate the seas without their permission.’ Strange and comprehensive claim, yet basically one which every European nation, in its turn, held firmly almost to the end of Western supremacy in Asia. It is true that no other nation put it forward so crudely or tried to enforce it so barbarously as the Portuguese in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, but the principle that the doctrines of international law did not apply outside Europe, that what would be barbarism in London or Paris is civilized conduct in Peking (e. g. the burning of the Summer Palace) and that European nations had no moral obligations in dealing with Asian peoples (as for example when Britain insisted on the opium trade against the laws of China, though opium smoking was prohibited by law in England itself) was pact of the accepted creed of Europe’s relations with Asia. So late as 1870 the President of the Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce declared: ‘China can in no sense be considered a country entitled to all the same rights and privileges as civilized nations which are bound by international law.’ Till the end of European domination the fact that rights existed for Asians against Europeans was conceded only with considerable mental reservation. In countries under direct British occupation, like India, Burma and Ceylon, there were equal rights established by law, but that as against Europeans the law was not enforced very rigorously was known and recognized. In China, under extra‑territorial jurisdiction, Europeans were protected against the operation of Chinese laws. In fact, except in Japan this doctrine of different rights persisted to the very end and was a prime cause of Europe’s ultimate failure in Asia.”

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

People, Law, Failure, Sense

“In the open sea, he said. Now shut up and eat your Junior Mints.”

Sarah Dessen book Dreamland

Dreamland (2000)

“As Scots our Celtic heritage ties us closely together. It binds us with our cousins in Northern Ireland, the Irish Republic and Wales. And with other Europeans lucky to blessed with good weather. We have Celtic cousins in Brittany, Galicia and Cornwall. Our is a heritage shared in a love of music and song, of poetry - and a special affinity with the sea and with nature.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Vision for Scotland in the European Union (December 12, 2007)

Love, Music, Nature, Weather

“His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.”

Idi Amin (1925–2003) third president of Uganda

His full, formal title, which he conferred upon himself. Quoted inAfricana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (1999) by Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates
Attributed

Life, Fish

“I never was on the dull, tame shore,
But I loved the great sea more and more.”

Bryan Procter (1787–1874) English poet

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

Love

“Each look'd upon his comrade's face,
Pale as funereal stone;
Yet none could touch the other's hand,
For none could feel his own.
Like statues fixed, that gallant band
Stood on the dread deck to die;
The sleet was their shroud, the wind their dirge,
And their churchyard the sea and sky.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Feeling

“Within the state we have made defense of the individual the obligation of the whole community, and by that fact have established such preponderance of power on the side of the law that it could never be good business to challenge it. And that fact has, in large measure, swept highwaymen from the roads and pirates from the seas.”

Norman Angell (1872–1967) British politician

Peace and the Public Mind (1935)

Law, Communication, Business

“'What's your impression of the ship so far?' she asked. 'Is it really super authentic?'
'Well, it does seem to be floating,' Mr Söderblad said with a smile, 'in spite of heavy seas.'
Enid raised her voice to aid his comprehension. 'I mean, is it AUTHENTICALLY SCANDINAVIAN?'
'Well, yes, of course," Mr. Söderblad said. 'At the same time, everything in the world is more and more American, don't you think?'”

Jonathan Franzen book The Corrections

The Corrections (2001)

World, Smile, Thinking, Time

“It was like being quite alone on the roof of the world. I felt that if I were to go to the edge and look over … I would see below all that I had ever known; all the crowded cities and seas covered with ships, and the clamor of harbors and traffic of rivers, and farmlands being worked, and herds of cattle driven in dust across interminable plains. All the clamor and clatter, confusion of voices, tumults, and conflicts, must still be going on, down there—over the edge, and below—but here there was only the sky, and a stillness made audible by the brittle grass. Emptiness was so perfect all around me that I felt a part of it, empty myself.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Letter to the Clarence Day (June 10, 1926)
Describing her stop on a remote Russian plateau while with the Red Cross after WWI.

World, Grass, Parting, Perfection

“Primarily the American Republic has entered the war in defense of its national rights. If we did not defend we could not hope to endure. Other big issues are involved but the maintained rights and defended honor of a righteous nation includes them all. Cherishing the national rights the fathers fought to establish, and loving freedom and civilization, we should have violated every tradition and sacrificed every inheritance if we had longer held aloof from the armed conflict which is to make the world safe for civilization. More, we are committed to sacrifice in battle in order to make America safe for Americans and establish their security on every lawful mission on the high seas or under the shining sun.”

Warren G. Harding (1865–1923) American politician, 29th president of the United States (in office from 1921 to 1923)

1910s, The Republic Must Awaken (1917)

Love, War, World, Law

“Like all real treasures of the mind, perception can be split into infinitely small fractions without losing its quality. The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods; the farmer may see in his cow-pasture what may not be vouchsafed to the scientist adventuring in the South Seas.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "Conservation Esthetic", p. 174.

“The courage to press on regardless—regardless of whether we face calm seas or rough seas, and especially when the market storms howl around us—is the quintessential attribute of the successful investor.”

John Bogle (1929–2019)

Speech at the Trinity University Policymaker Breakfast Series, April 16, 2001 ( http://www.vanguard.com/bogle_site/sp20010416.html)

Courage, Success

“The ultimate meaning of the angry young man is not known. What is known is the shape of his greatest fear—that all of his efforts, from learning to speak to learning to write, to write well, to write badly, to write angrily, from learning to despise to learning to abominate, to abominate well, to abominate badly, to abominate abominably, to rant, to fulminate, to shout down the sea, to age, to age graefully, to age awkwardly, to age at all, to think, to regret, to list himself in the newspapers under “Lost and Found”, might culminate precisely in this: a roaring, raging, crazy mad passionate bibliography.”

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) American writer, editor, and professor

“The Angry Young Man”, p. 111.
The Teachings of Don. B: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme (1992)

Age, Fear, Thinking, Effort

“Look, stranger, on this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be,
That through the channels of the ear
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.”

W. H. Auden (1907–1973) Anglo-American poet

Look, Stranger, on This Island Now (1936), first published in book form in Look, Stranger! (1936; US title On this Island)

Light

“My first informed impression, and what I would like to achieve, I can perhaps only realize when I am impelled as in a vision. One of my figures, perhaps one from the Temptation, sang his strange song to me one night –.. We are playing hide-and-seek, we are playing hide-and-seek across a thousand seas, we gods.... when the skies are red in the middle of the night, when the skies are red at night. You cannot see us, you cannot see us but you are ourselves.... that is what makes us laugh so gaily... Stars are our eyes and nebulae our beards.... we have people's souls for our hearts. We hide ourselves and you cannot see us, which is just what we want.”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

Source: 1930s, On my Painting (1938), p. 19

God, People, Soul, Star

“This is not genuine scholarship! Real research is a coming-to-grips with phenomena. This, as a transcription of the ocean’s infinitely various text, is a fraud, an egregious counterfeit, which patly reduces the Primary Sea’s endlessness to a cozy finitude, such as it pleased this puny entity to regard it, for he must have had but a feeble stomach for enterprise of a dark or difficult kind.”

Michael Shea book Nifft the Lean

Part 3, Chapter 11 (p. 168)
Nifft the Lean (1982)

Fraud

“I have to make the declaration, but can you doubt what our policy will be? We have but one aim and one single, irrevocable purpose. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime. From this nothing will turn us—nothing. We will never parley, we will never negotiate with Hitler or any of his gang. We shall fight him by land, we shall fight him by sea, we shall fight him in the air, until, with God's help, we have rid the earth of his shadow and liberated its peoples from his yoke. Any man or state who fights on against Nazidom will have our aid. Any man or state who marches with Hitler is our foe. That is our policy and that is our declaration. It follows therefore that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and the Russian people.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Radio broadcast (22 June 1941) on the day Germany invaded the Soviet Union, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 1121
The Second World War (1939–1945)

God, People, Help, Fight

“…when I started doing chemistry, I did it the way I fished – for the excitement, the discovery, the adventure, for going after the most elusive catch imaginable in uncharted seas.”

K. Barry Sharpless (1941) American chemist

Nobel lecture, 2001

Way, Imagination, Fish

“And now, as a result of honoring our commitment to our gallant allies, that man Roosevelt has sought from the U. S. Congress a declaration of war not only against England and France but also against the Confederate States of America. His servile lackeys, misnamed Democrats, have given him what he wanted, and the telegraph informs me that fighting has begun along our border and on the high seas. Leading our great and peaceful people into war is a fearful thing, not least because, with the great advances of science and industry over the past half-century, this may prove the most disastrous and terrible of all wars, truly a war of the nations: indeed a war of the world. But right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for those things we have always held dear in our hearts: for the rights of the Confederate States and of the white men who live in them; for the liberties of small nations everywhere from outside oppression; for our own freedom and independence from the vicious, bloody regime to the north. To such a task we can dedicate our lives and fortunes, everything we are and all that we have, with the pride of those who know the day has come when the Confederacy is privileged to spend her blood and her strength for the principles that gave her birth and led to her present happiness. God helping us, we can do nothing else. Men of the Confederacy, is it your will that a state of war should exist henceforth between us and the United States of America?" "Yes!”

Harry Turtledove book The Great War: American Front

The answer roared from Reginald Bartlett's throat, as from those of the other tens of thousands of people jamming the Capitol Square. Someone flung a straw hat in the air. In an instant, hundreds of them, Bartlett's included, were flying. A great chorus of "Dixie" rang out, loud enough, Bartlett thought, for the damnyankees to hear it in Washington.
Source: The Great War: American Front (1998), p. 33

Men, God, War, Happiness

“Most imprisoned writers have been shut away for their activities as citizens striving for liberation against the oppression of the general society to which they belong. Others have been condemned by repressive regimes for serving society by writing as well as they can; for this aesthetic venture of ours becomes subversive when the shameful secrets of our times are explored deeply, with the artist's rebellious integrity to the state of being manifest in life around her or him; then the writer's themes and characters inevitably are formed by the pressures and distortions of that society as the life of the fisherman is determined by the power of the sea.”

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer

Writing and Being (1991)

Life, Secret, Time

“When the cabin port-holes are dark and green
Because of the seas outside;
When the ship goes wop (with a wiggle between)
And the steward falls into the soup-tureen,
And the trunks begin to slide;
When Nursey lies on the floor in a heap,
And Mummy tells you to let her sleep,
And you aren't waked or washed or dressed,
Why, then you will know (if you haven't guessed)
You're ‘Fifty North and Forty West!”

Rudyard Kipling book Just So Stories

How the Whale Got His Throat.
Just So Stories (1902)

Sleep

“Drink, my jolly lads, drink with discerning,
Wedlock's a lane where there is no turning;
Never was owl more blind than a lover,
Drink and be merry, lads, half seas over.”

Dinah Craik (1826–1887) English novelist and poet

"Magnus and Morna", in Thirty Years, Poems New and Old (1880)

Lovers, Drink

“Green, how I want you green.
Green wind. Green branches.
The ship out on the sea
and the horse on the mountain.”

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director

Verde que te quiero verde. Verde viento. Verdes ramas. El barco sobre la mar y el caballo en la montaña. " Romance Sonámbulo http://www.poesia-inter.net/index203.htm" from Primer Romancero Gitano (1928)

Mountain, Horse

“America is no longer an obscure and inaccessible country. Our ships are in every sea, our commerce is in every port, our language is heard all around the globe, steam and lightning have revolutionized the whole domain of human thought, changed all geographical relations, make a day of the present seem equal to a thousand years of the past, and the continent that Columbus only conjectured four centuries ago is now the center of the world.”

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

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

World, Change, Past, Country

“It must be the old, darling, foolish Highlands in us, my dear, the old people and the old stupid stories they are telling us for generations round he fire, and it must be the hills about us, and the constant complaint of the sea.”

Neil Munro (Hugh Foulis) (1863–1930) Journalist, author, critic

Gilian the Dreamer, ch. 5.

People, Stupidity

“After the week of stormy weather, she set sail under sunny skies, on a glassy sea with a big swell running.”

Abby Sunderland (1993) Camera Assistant, Inspirational Speaker and Sailor

Source: Unsinkable: A Young Woman's Courageous Battle on the High Seas (2011), p. 63

Weather

“With silent strides Odysseus then shot back the bolt,
passed lightly through the courtyard and sped down the street.
Some saw him take the graveyard's zigzag mountain path,
some saw him leap on rocks that edged the savage shore,
some visionaries saw him in the dead of night
swimming and talking secretly with the sea-demons,
but only a small boy saw him in a lonely dream
sit crouched and weeping by the dark sea's foaming edge.”

Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957) Greek writer

Book II, line 457
The Odyssey : A Modern Sequel (1938)

Dreams, Mountain, Boy, Night

“[Fox] exhibited two pictures of this country; the one representing her at the end of the last glorious war, the other at the present moment. At the end of the last war this country was raised to a most dazzling height of splendour and respect. The French marine was in a manner annihilated, the Spanish rendered contemptible; the French were driven from America; new sources of commerce were opened, the old enlarged; our influence extended to a predominance in Europe, our empire of the ocean established and acknowledged, and our trade filling the ports and harbours of the wondering and admiring world. Now mark the degradation and the change, We have lost thirteen provinces of America; we have lost several of our Islands, and the rest are in danger; we have lost the empire of the sea; we have lost our respect abroad and our unanimity at home; the nations have forsaken us, they see us distracted and obstinate, and they leave us to our fate. Country! …This was your situation, when you were governed by Whig ministers and by Whig measures, when you were warmed and instigated by a just and a laudable cause, when you were united and impelled by the confidence which you had in your ministers, and when they were again strengthened and emboldened by your ardour and enthusiasm. This is your situation, when you are under the conduct of Tory ministers and a Tory system, when you are disunited, disheartened, and have neither confidence in your ministers nor union among yourselves; when your cause is unjust and your conductors are either impotent or treacherous.”

Charles James Fox (1749–1806) British Whig statesman

Speech in the House of Commons (27 November 1781), reprinted in J. Wright (ed.), The Speeches of the Rt. Hon. C. J. Fox in the House of Commons. Volume I (1815), p. 429.
1780s

Fate, War, World, Home

“Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
of that man skilled in all ways of contending,
the wanderer, harried for years on end,
after he plundered the stronghold
on the proud height of Troy.
He saw the townlands
and learned the minds of many distant men,
and weathered many bitter nights and days
in his deep heart at sea, while he fought only
to save his life, to bring his shipmates home.
But not by will nor valor could he save them,
for their own recklessness destroyed them all—
children and fools, they killed and feasted on
the cattle of Lord Hêlios, the Sun,
and he who moves all day through the heaven
took from their eyes the dawn of their return.”

Robert Fitzgerald (1910–1985) American poet, critic and translator

opening lines
The Odyssey (1961)

Life, Men, Children, Fools

“The sea, the sea is everything! Its sovereign mass
brings to me atoms of a myriad faraway lands;
Its bright smile animates me in the limpid mornings
And when at the end of day my faith has failed me
My heart echoes the sound of its sorrow in the sands.”

José Rizal (1861–1896) Filipino writer, ophthalmologist, polyglot and nationalist

"Mi Retiro", st.6 - translated by Nick Joaquin.

Faith, Smile, Heart, Animals

“Out of the meaningless practical shapes of all that is living or lifeless
Joined with the artist's eye, new life, new form, new colour.
Out of the sea of sound the life of music,
Out of the slimy mud of words, out of the sleet and hail of verbal imprecisions,
Approximate thoughts and feelings, words that have taken the place of thoughts and feelings,
There spring the perfect order of speech, and the beauty of incantation.”

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

Choruses from The Rock (1934)

Life, Beauty, Music, Feeling

“There is nothing at all that remains: nor any house; nor any castle, however strong; nor any love, however tender and sound; nor any comradeship among men, however hardy. Nothing remains but the things of which I will not speak, because we have spoken enough of them already during these four days. But I who am old will give you advice, which is this—to consider chiefly from now onwards those permanent things which are, as it were, the shores of this age and the harbours of our glittering and pleasant but dangerous and wholly changeful sea.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

By this, we are then told, "he meant Death." (p. 158)
Source: The Four Men: A Farrago (1911), pp. 157–8

Love, Men, Age, Strong

“The vastest point, the center, the infinity — Faëry, where the gigantic heroes ride across endless landscapes and sail sea upon sea and there is no end to possibility — that circle is so tiny it has no doors at all.”

John Crowley (1942) American writer

Bk. 6, Ch. 4
Little, Big: or, The Fairies' Parliament (1981)

“Time is a dream, he thinks, a destroying dream;
It lays great cities in dust, it fills the seas;
It covers the face of beauty, and tumbles walls.
Where was the woman he loved? Where was his youth?
Where was the dream that burned his brain like fire?
Even a dream grows grey at last and falls.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

Love, Youth, Beauty, Dreams

“And we learn this truth from His sight: That all we taste, in comparison with that which remains out of our reach, Is no more than a single drop of water compared with the whole sea…. We hunger for God’s Infinity, which we cannot devour, And we aspire to His Eternity, which we cannot attain…. In this storm of love, our activity is above reason and is in no wise. Love desires that which is impossible to her; And reason teaches that love is within her rights, but can neither counsel nor persuade her.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

The Sparkling Stone (c. 1340)

Love, Hunger, God, Truth

“Let it be our endeavour, let it be our task, to keep alight the torch of imperial patriotism, to hold fast the affection and the confidence of our kinsmen across the seas; so that in every vicissitude of fortune the British Empire may present an unbroken front to all her foes, and may carry on even to distant ages the glorious traditions of the British flag.”

Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914) British businessman, politician, and statesman

Speech entitled 'The True Conception of Empire' to the Royal Colonial Institute (31 March, 1897).
1890s

Age, Confidence, Distant

“Yes, and how many years can a mountain exist before it is washed to the sea?”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963), Blowin' in the Wind

Mountain

“The mighty river flowing dark and deep,
With ebb and flood from the remote sea-tides,
Vague-sounding through the City’s sleepless sleep,
Is named the River of the Suicides.”

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

Part XIX
The City of Dreadful Night (1870–74)

Suicide, Sleep

“Some say the Internet is for porn; but you know that in truth the Internet is for spam. As communication technologies got cheaper, the cost of grabbing a megaphone and jamming it up against the aching ear-drums of an advertising-jaded public collapsed: Meanwhile, the content-is-king mantra of the monetization mavens gridlocked the new media in an advertising-supported business model. The great and the good of the Academy have been fighting a losing battle against the Anglo-Saxon hucksterization model for the past thirty years: But the sad truth is that the battle’s lost. The tide of war was turned in Beijing and New Delhi, when the rapidly industrializing new superpowers climbed on the MAKE MONEY FAST band-wagon and gave free rein to the free market, red in tooth and claw—just as long as the sharp bits were directed outwards. And today the entire world is still drowning in a sea of attention-grabbing unregulated unethical untruthful spamvertising.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 13, “Kemal: Spamcop” (pp. 154-155)

Money, War, Truth, World

“Theres so many fish in the sea
That only rise up in the sweat and smoke like mercury”

Elvis Costello (1954) English singer-songwriter

Accidents Will Happen
Song lyrics, Armed Forces (1979)

Fish

“Everything intellectual and transcendent is joined together in painting by the uninterrupted labour of the eyes. Each shade of a flower, a face, a tree, a fruit, a sea, a mountain, is noted eagerly by the intensity of the senses to which is added, in a way of which we are not conscious, the work of the mind, and in the end the strength or weakness of the soul... It is the strength of soul which forces the mind to constant exercise to widen its conception of space. Something of this is perhaps contained in my pictures.”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

Source: 1930s, On my Painting (1938), p. 14

Way, Exercises, Soul, Mountain

“I made myself a little boat
And launched it on the sea;
And into the wide world went forth
To see what there might be.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(30th April 1825) Realities
The London Literary Gazette, 1825

World

“The area extending from the Himalayas in the north to the sea and a thousand yojanas wide from east to west is the area of operation of the King-Emperor.”

Chanakya book Arthashastra

Chakravarti-kshetra as described by Kautilya: Arthashastra 9:1:17 (tr. L.N. Rangarajan), quoted from Elst, Koenraad (2001). Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism. New Delhi: Rupa. p.457
Arthashastra

“Time passed, slipping through the waist of the universe's great hourglass like the eroded soil of this continent slipping down her rivers to the seas.”

Gene Wolfe book The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories

"Seven American Nights", Orbit 20 (1978), ed. Damon Knight, Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories (1980), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009)
Fiction

Universe, Time

“Doctors is all swabs…and that doctor there, why, what do he know about seafaring men? I been in places hot as pitch, and mates dropping round with Yellow Jack, and the blessed land a-heaving like the sea with earthquakes — what do the doctor know of lands like that?”

Robert Louis Stevenson book Treasure Island

and I lived on rum, I tell you.
Source: Treasure Island (1883), Ch. 3, The Black Spot.

Men

“This is very pretty,” said Elizalde…
“It’s morbid,” snapped Sullivan. “Burying a bunch of dead bodies, and putting a fancy marker over each one so the survivors will know where to go and cry. What if the markers got rearranged? You’d be weeping over some stranger. Not some stranger, even, some cast-off dead body of a stranger, like a pile of fingernail clippings or old shoes, or the dust from inside an electric razor. What’s the difference between coming out here to think about dead Uncle Irving, and thinking about him in your own living room? Okay, here you can sit on the grass and be only six feet above his inert old body. Would it be better if you could dig a hole, and sit only one foot above it?” He was shaking. “Everybody should be cremated, and the ashes should be tossed in the sea with no fanfare at all.”
“It’s a sign of respect,” said Elizalde angrily. “And it’s a real, tangible link. Think of the Shroud of Turin! Where would we be if they had cremated Jesus?”

Tim Powers book Expiration Date

“I don’t know—we’d have the Ashtray of Turin.”
Source: Expiration Date (1995), Chapter 40 (p. 308; ellipsis represents a minor elision of description)

Shoe, Thinking, Grass, Cry

“I have been haunted by that swim through the whale graveyard and haven’t been able to get the image of the bones out of my head. Man hunted whales almost to the point of extinction, not seeming to care that we would lose one of the wonders of the sea world forever. It is the coldness of the water in Antarctica that preserves the bones and makes it look like they were left there yesterday but I like to think they are there as a reminder of man’s potential for folly.”

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

p 315-6, describing his swim at Deception Island, Antarctica (2005)
Achieving The Impossible (2010)

World, Thinking, Water

“The waters were his winding sheet, the sea was made for his tomb;
Yet for his fame the ocean sea, was not sufficient room.”

Richard Barnfield (1574–1627) English poet

Epitaph on Hawkins (1595).

Water

“Arms, and the Man I sing, who first did land,
Fate-forc'd from Troy, on the Lavinian Strand;
Whom angry Gods at Sea and Land engage,
And cruel Juno's persecuting Rage.
Much suffer'd he by War, whilst Walls he rear'd,
And Trojan Gods to Latian Realms transferr'd;
Whence Latins, and the Alban Princes come,
And lofty Tow'rs of all-commanding Rome.”

John Ogilby (1600–1676) Scottish academic

The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro (2nd ed. 1654), Virgil's Æneis

God, Fate, War, Rage

“He [ Aristotle ] refers to many examples of changes now constantly going on, and insists emphatically on the great results which they must produce in the lapse of ages. He instances particular cases of lakes that had dried up, and deserts that had at length become watered by rivers and fertilized. He points to the growth of the Nilotic delta since the time of Homer, to the shallowing of the Palus Maeotis within sixty years from his own time… He alludes,… to the upheaving of one of the Eolian islands, previous to a volcanic eruption. The changes of the earth, he says, are so slow in comparison to the duration of our lives, that they are overlooked; and the migrations of people after great catastrophes, and their removal to other regions, cause the event to be forgotten…. He says [twelfth chapter of his Meteorics] 'the distribution of land and sea in particular regions does not endure throughout all time, but it becomes sea in those parts where it was land, and again it becomes land where it was sea, and there is reason for thinking that these changes take place according to a certain system, and within a certain period.' The concluding observation is as follows: 'As time never fails, and the universe is eternal, neither the Tanais, nor the Nile, can have flowed for ever. The places where they rise were once dry, and there is a limit to their operations, but there is none to time. So also of all other rivers; they spring up and they perish; and the sea also continually deserts some lands and invades others The same tracts, therefore, of the earth are not some always sea, and others always continents, but every thing changes in the course of time.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.2, p. 17
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

People, Age, Spring, Thinking

“But when you look at this tremendous sea of love — I call it a "sea of love" — it's really something special.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Trump describing a framed photograph of his inauguration crowd during an interview with David Muir https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDvoBoxv028, ABC (25 January 2017) 2010s, 2017, January

Love

“Some love to roam o’er the dark sea’s foam,
Where the shrill winds whistle free.”

Charles Mackay (1814–1889) British writer

"Some Love to Roam".
Legends of the Isles and Other Poems (1851)

Love

“Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

The chambered Nautilus; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Life, Art, Soul, Past

“The music ends. The screen grows dark. We hurry
To go our devious secret ways, forgetting
Those many lives... We loved, we laughed, we killed,
We danced in fire, we drowned in a whirl of sea-waves.
The flutes are stilled, and a thousand dreams are stilled.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

Love, Secret, Dreams, Music

“I prefer Mexican to Mayan sculpture. Mexican stone sculptures have largeness of scale & a grim, sublime, austerity, a real stoniness. They were the true sculptors in sympathy with their material & their sculpture has some of the character of mountains, of boulders, rocks & sea worn pebbles.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

in 'Unpublished notes', c. 1925-1926, HMF archive; as quoted in Henry Moore writings and Conversations, ed. Alan Wilkinson, University of California Press, California 2002, p. 97
1925 - 1940

Mountain

“I used to rule my world from a pay phone
And ships out on the sea.
But now times are rough
And I got too much stuff;
Can't explain the likes of me.But there's this one particular harbour,
So far but yet so near.
Where I see the days as they fade away,
And finally disappear.”

Jimmy Buffett (1946) American singer–songwriter and businessman

One Particular Harbour, written with Bobby Holcomb
Song lyrics, One Particular Harbour (1983)

World, Time

“My little fellow, about four years old, whom I brought with me, gave himself no trouble amid the boats, omnibuses, and railway coaches, on sea, land, and in dark tunnels; his father was at his side, and never a care or fear or doubt or anxiety had he. May we have grace to be led by the hand, and trust to the care and kindness of a reconciled God and Father.”

Thomas Guthrie (1803–1873) British divine

Source: The Autobiography of Thomas Guthrie and Memoir Vol.2 (1875), P. 203.

God, Fear

“I remained there [in The Netherlands, 1914-18] for the duration of the war, continuing my work of abstraction in a series of church. facades, trees, houses, etc. But I felt that I still worked as an Impressionist and was continuing to express particular feelings, not pure reality. Although I was thoroughly conscious that we can never be absolutely 'objective', I felt that one can become less and less subjective, until the subjective no longer predominates in one's work. More and more I excluded from my painting all curved lines, until finally my compositions consisted only of vertical and horizontal lines which formed crosses, each separate and detached from the other. Observing sea, sky and stars, I sought to indicate their plastic function through a multiplicity crossing verticals and horizontals.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Source: Quote of Mondrian about 1914-1918; in 'Mondrian, Essays' ('Plastic art and pure plastic art', 1937 and his other essays, (1941-1943) by Piet Mondrian; Wittenborn-Schultz Inc., New York, 1945, p. 10; as cited in De Stijl 1917-1931 - The Dutch Contribution to Modern Art, by H.L.C. Jaffé http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/jaff001stij01_01/jaff001stij01_01.pdf; J.M. Meulenhoff, Amsterdam 1956, p. 43

War, Feeling, Star, Reality

“Far from New England's blustering shore,
New England's worm her hulk shall bore,
And sink her in the Indian seas,
Twine, wine, and hides, and China teas.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Monday, Though All the Fates Should Prove Unkind, st. 2 A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Monday

Wine, Tea

“This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

page 438 Last lines of the documentary film series " The National Parks: America's Best Idea http://www.pbs.org/nationalparks/" by Ken Burns. John of the Mountains, 1938

“I am not alone in making this point. At least one European Indologist accuses Pollock of relocating Orientalism 'to the "New Raj" across the deep blue sea.'”

Rajiv Malhotra book The Battle for Sanskrit

The Battle for Sanskrit (2016)
Source: Reference is to Gruenendahl 2012

“There is no doubt that to our people, whether they live on the sea-coast, in the great towns, or inland, the Royal Navy is in some subtle way the repository of the spirit and the tradition of our nation.”

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

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1936/may/05/memorial-to-admiral-of-the-fleet-earl in the House of Commons (5 May 1936). 1936

People, Way

“The sea is the universal sewer.”

Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910–1997) French naval officer, explorer, conservationist, filmmaker, innovator, scientist, photographer, author and …

Declaring the sea to be "where all kinds of pollution wind up", to the US House Committee on Science and Astronautics (28 January 1971)

Universe

“Grey-eyed Athene sent them a favourable gale, a fresh West Wind, singing over the wine-dark sea.”

Homér The Odyssey (Cowper)

II. 420–421 (tr. S. H. Butcher and Andrew Lang).
Odyssey (c. 725 BC)

Wine, Singing

“There is an inherent Mediterranean austerity much in evidence in the Naples area, in Sorrento and Capri, which seems to come from the sea, since it is hardly to be found inland.”

Norman Lewis book Naples '44

Naples '44

“And I have known the arms already, known them all —
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair! ]
It is perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
:And how should I begin?

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

T.S. Eliot The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)

Lie, Light

“We shall not read it for its sociological insights, which are non-existent, nor as science fiction, because it has a general air of implausibility; but there is one high poetic fancy in the New Atlantis that stays in the mind after all its fancies and inventions have been forgotten. In the New Atlantis, an island kingdom lying in very distant seas, the only commodity of external trade is — light: Bacon's own special light, the light of understanding.”

Peter Medawar (1915–1987) scientist

On Francis Bacon's New Atlantis
1960s, Presidential Address, 1969

Lying, Understanding, Light, Distant

“Think of the majesty of that moment in this dying world's history, when Jesus Christ declared that to the Christian death was only a sleep. Outside of that small dwelling in Capernaum, a great race of men rushed and toiled as they harassed continents and seas; mighty events marshaled themselves into annals and pageants. What was inside? In one inconspicuous chamber of a now forgotten house, man's Redeemer, unobserved, martyred man's final enemy. There Immanuel subdued death forever.”

Charles Seymour Robinson (1829–1899) American pastor, editor and compiler of hymns

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 64.

Death, Men, World, History

“The children of fighter pilots tell different stories than other kids do. None of our fathers can write a will or sell a life insurance policy or fill out a prescription or administer a flu shot or explain what a poet meant. We tell of fathers who land on aircraft carriers at pitch-black night with the wind howling out of the China Sea. Our fathers wiped out aircraft batteries in the Philippines and set Japanese soldiers on fire when they made the mistake of trying to overwhelm our troops on the ground. Your Dads ran the barber shops and worked at the post office and delivered the packages on time and sold the cars, while our Dads were blowing up fuel depots near Seoul, were providing extraordinarily courageous close air support to the beleaguered Marines at the Chosin Reservoir, and who once turned the Naktong River red with blood of a retreating North Korean battalion. We tell of men who made widows of the wives of our nations' enemies and who made orphans out of all their children. You don't like war or violence? Or napalm? Or rockets? Or cannons or death rained down from the sky? Then let's talk about your fathers, not ours. When we talk about the aviators who raised us and the Marines who loved us, we can look you in the eye and say "you would not like to have been American's enemies when our fathers passed overhead". We were raised by the men who made the United States of America the safest country on earth in the bloodiest century in all recorded history. Our fathers made sacred those strange, singing names of battlefields across the Pacific: Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, the Chosin Reservoir, Khe Sanh and a thousand more. We grew up attending the funerals of Marines slain in these battles. Your fathers made communities like Beaufort decent and prosperous and functional; our fathers made the world safe for democracy.”

Pat Conroy (1945–2016) American novelist

Eulogy for a Fighter Pilot (1998)

Love, Life, Death, Men

“Words are the currency of love and friendship, of making and marketing, of peace and war. Nations are bound and loosed by them. Three or four simple words can move waves of emotion through the hearts of multitudes like great tides of the sea: "Lest we forget."”

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

"Patriotism is not enough."
Speech at his inauguration as Lord Rector of The University of Edinburgh (6 November 1925), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), p. 78.
1925

Love, Friendship, War, Peace

“I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be better for mankind-and all the worse for the fishes.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

Part of a statement at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Medical Society (30 May 1860), generally quoted in a simplified form omitting Holmes's exceptions including opium and anaesthetics. Throw out opium, which the Creator himself seems to prescribe, for we often see the scarlet poppy growing in the cornfields, as if it were foreseen that wherever there is hunger to be fed there must also be a pain to be soothed; throw out a few specifics which our art did not discover, and it is hardly needed to apply; throw out wine, which is a food, and the vapors which produce the miracle of anaesthesia, and I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica [medical drugs], as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind,—and all the worse for the fishes. As quoted in a review of Currents and Counter-currents in Medical Science (1860) in The American Journal of the Medical Sciences, Vol. 40 (1860), p. 467 http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zHdDAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA467 Paraphrased variant: If all the medicine in the world were thrown into the sea, it would be bad for the fish and good for humanity.

Fish

“Except by name, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter is little known out of Germany. The only thing connected with him, we think, that has reached this country is his saying,—imported by Madame de Staël, and thankfully pocketed by most newspaper critics, — "Providence has given to the French the empire of the land; to the English that of the sea; to the Germans that of—the air!"”

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

Richter.
1820s, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855)

Thinking, Country

“Dad wasn’t there much cos he had three or four jobs. First he was away at sea, later on he worked as an insurance salesman in the day and on a building site in the evening.”

Holly Johnson (1960) British artist

The 5 Tribes Of Frankie http://www.zttaat.com/article.php?title=797 by Paul Simper at zttaat.com, Accessed May 2014.

“I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Chapter 1 “A Parade in Ehrenrang” (p. 1; opening paragraph)

Truth, Imagination

“One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now, out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.”

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) Welsh poet and writer

" A Child's Christmas in Wales http://www.undermilkwood.net/prose_christmas.html", from Quite Early One Morning (1954)

Sleep, Distant, Christmas, Night

“Yes, it is a painful lot to be a poet and to love both God and man by the farthest northern seas!”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book One: The Revelation of the Deity

Love, God, Pain

“The world's energy consumption is bound to vastly increase over the next two or three decades. Estimates by the U. S. Department of Energy anticipate that world demand will rise by more than 50 percent between 1993 and 2015, with the most significant increase in consumption occurring in the Far East. The momentum of Asia's economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea.”

Zbigniew Brzeziński book The Grand Chessboard

Source: The Grand Chessboard (1997), Chapter 5, The Eurasian Balkans, p. 125.

World, Nature

“"God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good."
And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth.”

Frank Borman (1928) NASA astronaut

Last lines of the Apollo 8 Genesis reading, and adding his own closing to the message from Apollo 8 crew, as they celebrated becoming the first humans to enter lunar orbit, Christmas Eve (24 December 1968) http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/apollo8_xmas.html

God, Water, Christmas, Night