Quotes about the sea
page 2

“I am alone again and I want to be so; alone with the pure sky and open sea.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

“The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

“In high seas or in low seas,
I'm gonna be your friend…
I'm gonna be your friend.
In high tide or in low tide,
I'll be by your side…
I'll be by your side.”

Bob Marley (1945–1981) Jamaican singer, songwriter, musician

Song High Tide Or Low Tide

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

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

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

Love, Star, Heart, Wise

“The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) American poet

God, Soul, Heart

“Wild Nights – Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile – the winds –
To a heart in port –
Done with the compass –
Done with the chart!

Rowing in Eden –
Ah, the sea!
Might I moor – Tonight –
In thee!”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

Source: Selected Poems

Heart, Night

“It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.”

Dylan Thomas book Under Milk Wood

Source: " Under Milk Wood http://www.undermilkwood.net/prose_umw1.html" (1954)

People, Spring, Cats, Sleep

“Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red.”

William Shakespeare Macbeth

Source: Macbeth

“I am looking forward enormously to getting back to the sea again, where the overstimulated psyche can recover in the presence of that infinite peace and spaciousness.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Peace

“When you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.”

Christopher Morley book Parnassus on Wheels

Variant: When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean.
Source: Parnassus on Wheels

Love, Life, Friendship, Books

“With which stars do they go on speaking, the rivers that never reach the sea?”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Source: The Book of Questions

Star

“Joy is to fun what the deep sea is to a puddle. It’s a feeling inside that can hardly be contained.”

Terry Pratchett book A Hat Full of Sky

Source: A Hat Full of Sky

Feeling, Joy

“A mind forever Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

“I grew, a happy, healthy child in a bright world of illustrated books, clean sand, orange trees, friendly dogs, sea vistas and smiling faces.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

Happiness, Books, World, Smile

“My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

Nature, Heart

“The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright--
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

Sun, Night

“We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.”

John Archibald Wheeler (1911–2008) American physicist

Scientific American (1992), Vol. 267.

Knowledge

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”

H.P. Lovecraft book The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

Source: The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

World, Thinking

“Inside that darkness, i saw rain falling on the sea. Rain softly falling on a vast sea, with no one there to see it. The rain strikes the surface of the sea, yet even the fish don't know it is raining.”

Haruki Murakami book South of the Border, West of the Sun

Source: South of the Border, West of the Sun

Fish

“I need the sea because it teaches me”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Source: On the Blue Shore of Silence: Poems of the Sea

“I never dreamed the sea so deep,
The earth so dark; so long my sleep,
I have become another child.
I wake to see the world go wild.”

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) American poet

World, Dreams, Sleep

“My house completed, and tried and not found wanting by a first Cape Cod year, I went there to spend a fortnight in September. The fortnight ending, I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go. The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dunes these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and the year.”

Henry Beston (1888–1968) American writer

Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

World, Beauty, Autumn, Nature

“Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night. Primitive folk, gathered at a cave mouth round a fire, do not fear night; they fear, rather, the energies and creatures to whom night gives power; we of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars? Having made themselves at home in a civilization obsessed with power, which explains its whole world in terms of energy, do they fear at night for their dull acquiescence and the pattern of their beliefs? Be the answer what it will, to-day's civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night, who have never even seen night. Yet to live thus, to know only artificial night, is as absurd and evil as to know only artificial day.”

Henry Beston (1888–1968) American writer

Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod

People, Age, World, Fear

“I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

Source: A Thousand Mornings

Love, Dependency

“We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

Love, Death, Books, Suicide

“Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall”

Virginia Woolf book Mrs Dalloway

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

Fear, Heart

“A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Laughter in the Dark

Source: Laughter in the Dark

Fish

“Si todos los rios son dulces
de donde saca sal el mar?

If all rivers are sweet
where does the sea get its salt?”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Source: The Book of Questions

“The small wisdom is like water in a glass:
clear, transparent, pure.
The great wisdom is like the water in the sea:
dark, mysterious, impenetrable.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Wisdom, Water

“I was alive when the Dead Sea was just a lake that was feeling a little poorly.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Source: City of Ashes

Feeling, Dead

“The sea, the sea, the sea. It rolled and rolled and called to me. Come in, it said, come in.”

Sharon Creech book The Wanderer

Source: The Wanderer

“I know what you want. It is very stupid of you, but you shall have your way, and it will bring you to sorrow, my pretty princess. - The sea witch.”

Hans Christian Andersen book The Little Mermaid

Source: The Little Mermaid

Stupidity, Way, Princess

“There's lots of good fish in the sea… maybe… but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.”

D.H. Lawrence book Lady Chatterley's Lover

Source: Lady Chatterley's Lover

Fish

“We two have paddled in the stream,
from morning sun till dine;
But seas between us broad have roared
since days of long ago.”

Robert Burns (1759–1796) Scottish poet and lyricist

Sun

“My soul is full of longing
For the secret of the Sea,
And the heart of the great ocean
Sends a thrilling pulse through me.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

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

Secret, Soul, Heart

“If I am going to be drowned — if I am going to be drowned — if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods, who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?”

Stephen Crane book The Open Boat

Pt. VI
The Open Boat (1894)
Source: The Open Boat and Other Stories

God, Tree, Madness

“The water in a vessel is sparkling; the water in the sea is dark. The small truth has words that are clear; the great truth has great silence.”

Rabindranath Tagore Stray Birds

176
Stray Birds (1916)

Truth, Silence, Water

“The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

Bird, Sleep, Night

“And thus He mused: "From here, indeed
Shall we strike terror in the Swede?
And here a city by our labor
Founded, shall gall our haughty neighbor;
"Here cut" - so Nature gives command -
Your window through on Europe; stand
Firm-footed by the sea, unchanging!”

Aleksandr Pushkin The Bronze Horseman

The Bronze Horseman (1833).

Nature

“Martin Luther King, Jr. once wrote that you cannot commit an act of violence against a non-sentient object. Back in 1986, the Green Party of Canada tried to toss me out of the Party for sinking whaling ships on the ground that it was a violent act. I pointed out that the Green Party of Canada supported violence when it was convenient politically — for example they supported and continue to support abortion which is, like it or not, a violent act, certainly more violent than sinking some metal into the sea. Violence is not violent when we justify it, be it abortion, or war, or eating meat for example. I support abortion but I'm not a hypocrite about it — it's violent, I accept that. Every American taxpayer accepts the violence that their tax-dollars fund.”

Paul Watson (1950) Canadian environmental activist

When asked how he addressed accusations of property destruction as being a violent act. Taken from an interview given to the environmentalist magazine, Resistance: Journal of the Earth Liberation Movement http://www.resistancemagazine.org/

War, Support

“These palms are driving me crazy; the motifs are extremely difficult to seize, to put on canvas; it's so bushy everywhere, although delightful to the eye... I would like to do orange and lemon trees silhouetted against the blue sea, but cannot find them as I would like.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

in a letter from Bordighera to friends in Paris, Jan. 1884; as cited in: Joslyn Art Museum, ‎Holliday T. Day, ‎Hollister Sturges (1987), Joslyn Art Museum: Paintings and Sculpture from the European and American Collections, p. 100
1870 - 1890

Tree

“There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hard-working artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life’s task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?”

Thomas Mann book Death in Venice

Source: Death in Venice (1912), Ch. 3, as translated by David Luke

Love, Life, Lie, Perfection

“There is an insect that people avoid
(Whence is derived the verb 'to flee').
Where have you been by it most annoyed?
In lodgings by the Sea.”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

A Sea Dirge
Rhyme? and Reason? (1883)

People

“I dare not think of the sun-drenched beaches and the stormy skies, and of the joy of painting them in the sea breezes.”

Eugène Boudin (1824–1898) French painter

Quote in a letter, from Paris 14 June 1869, to family-friend Ferdinand Martin; as cited by Colin B. Bailey in The Annenberg Collection: Masterpieces of Impressionism and Post-impressionism, publisher, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2009, p. 7
Boudin felt himself detained in the big city Paris and longed fort the beach
1850s - 1870s

Thinking, Sun, Joy, Painting

“We must believe in one God that we may love & fear him. We must believe that he is the father Almighty, or first author of all things by the almighty power of his will, that we may thank & worship him & him alone for our being and for all the blessings of this life < insertion from f 43v > We must believe that this is the God of moses & the Jews who created heaven & earth & the sea & all things therein as is expressed in the ten commandments, that we may not take his name in vain nor worship images or visible resemblances nor have (in our worship) any other God then him. For he is without similitude he is the invisible God whom no eye hath seen nor can see, & therefore is not to be worshipped in any visible shape. He is the only invisible God & the only God whom we are to worship & therefore we are not to worship any visible image picture likeness or form. We are not forbidden to give the name of Gods to Angels & Kings but we are forbidden to worship them as Gods. For tho there be that are called Gods whether in heaven or in earth (as there are Gods many & Lords many) yet to us there is but one God the Father of whom are all things & we in him & our Lord Jesus Christ by whom are all things & we in him, that is, but one God & one Lord in our worship: One God & one mediator between God & man the man Christ Jesus. We are forbidden to worship two Gods but we are not forbidden to worship one God, & one Lord: one God for creating all things & one Lord for redeeming us with his blood. We must not pray to two Gods, but we may pray to one God in the name of one Lord. We must believe therefore in one Lord Jesus Christ that we may behave our selves obediently towards him as subjects & keep his laws, & give him that honour & glory & worship which is due to him as our Lord & King or else we are not his people. We must believe that this Lord Jesus is the Christ, or Messiah the Prince predicted by Daniel, & we must worship him as the Messiah or else we are no Christians. The Jews who were taught to have but one God were also taught to expect a king, & the Christians are taught in their Creed to have the same God & to believe that Jesus is that King.”

Isaac Newton (1643–1727) British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern classical physics

Drafts on the history of the Church (Section 3). Yahuda Ms. 15.3, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, Israel. 2006 Online Version at Newton Project http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00220

Love, Life, God, People

“All round me are words, and words and words, They grow on me like leaves, they never Seem to stop their slow growing From within… But I tell my self, words Are a nuisance, beware of them, they Can be so many things, a Chasm where running feet must pause, to Look, a sea with paralyzing waves, A blast of burning air or, A knife most willing to cut your best Friend's throat… Words are a nuisance, but. They grow on me like leaves on a tree, They never seem to stop their coming, From a silence, somewhere deep within…”

Kamala Surayya (1934–2009) Indian author

Kamala Suraiyya Das (Summer in Calcutta)

Tree, Silence

“The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides. The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion.”

Jules Verne book Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

La mer est tout! Elle couvre les sept dixièmes du globe terrestre. Son souffle est pur et sain. C'est l'immense désert où l'homme n'est jamais seul, car il sent frémir la vie à ses côtés. La mer n'est que le véhicule d'une surnaturelle et prodigieuse existence; elle n'est que mouvement et amour.
Part I, ch. X: The Man of the Seas
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870)

Love, Life, Feeling

“I was born undisciplined. Never, even as a child, could I be made to obey a set rule. What little I know I learned at home. School was always like a prison to me, I could never bring myself to stay there, even four hours a day, when the sun was shining and the sea was so tempting, and it was such fun scrambling over cliffs and paddling in the shallows. Such, to the great despair of my parents, was the unruly but healthy life I lived until I was fourteen or fifteen. In the meantime I somehow picked up the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic, with a smattering of spelling. And there my schooling ended. It never worried me very much because I always had plenty of amusements on the side. I doodled in the margins of my books, I decorated our blue copy paper with ultra-fantastic drawings, and I drew the faces and profiles of my schoolmasters as outrageously as I could, distorting them out of all recognition.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

in Denis Rouart (1972) Claude Monet, p. 21 : About his youth
after Monet's death

Life, Books, School, Home

“Here I still flow in God as a small stream of time,
There I shall be a sea of blessedness sublime”

Angelus Silesius (1624–1677) German writer

The Cherubinic Wanderer

God, Time

“Some unsuspected isle in the far seas,—
Some unsuspected isle in far-off seas.”

Robert Browning Pippa Passes

Part II.
Pippa Passes (1841)

“The past was real. The present, all about me, was unreal, unnatural, repellent. I saw the big ships lying in the stream… the home of hardship and hopelessness; the boats passing to and fro; the cries of the sailors at the capstan or falls; the peopled beach; the large hide houses, with their gangs of men; and the Kanakas interspersed everywhere. All, all were gone! Not a vestige to mark where one hide house stood. The oven, too, was gone. I searched for its site, and found, where I thought it should be, a few broken bricks and bits of mortar. I alone was left of all, and how strangely was I here! What changes to me! Where were they all? Why should I care for them — poor Kanakas and sailors, the refuse of civilization, the outlaws and the beachcombers of the Pacific! Time and death seemed to transfigure them. Doubtless nearly all were dead; but how had they died, and where? In hospitals, in fever climes, in dens of vice, or falling from the mast, or dropping exhausted from the wreck "When for a moment, like a drop of rain/He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan/Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown." The lighthearted boys are now hardened middle-aged men, if the seas, rocks, fevers, and the deadlier enemies that beset a sailor's life on shore have spared them; and the then strong men have bowed themselves, and the earth or sea has covered them. How softening is the effect of time! It touches us through the affections. I almost feel as if I were lamenting the passing away of something loved and dear — the boats, the Kanakas, the hides, my old shipmates! Death, change, distance, lend them a character which makes them quite another thing.”

Richard Henry Dana Jr. (1815–1882) United States author and lawyer

Twenty-Four Years After (1869)

Love, Life, Death, Men

“He who controls the sea controls everything.”

Themistocles (-524–-459 BC) Athenian statesman

As quoted in Australia Defence http://www.australiandefence.com.au/CE98DE40-F806-11DD-8DFE0050568C22C9 Originally quoted by Cicero in Letters to Atticus http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0008%3Abook%3D10%3Aletter%3D8%3Asection%3D4 (10, 8, 4.): ... cuius omne consilium Themistocleum est. existimat enim qui mare teneat eum necesse esse rerum potiri. Translation http://perseus.uchicago.edu/perseus-cgi/citequery3.pl?dbname=PerseusLatinTexts&getid=1&query=Cic.%20Att.%2010.8: "On the contrary, his view is entirely that of Themistocles: for he holds that the master of the sea must inevitably be master of the empire."

“Just as we have the power to harm the ocean, we have the power to put in place policies and modify our own behavior in ways that would be an insurance policy for the future of the sea, for the creatures there, and for us, protecting special critical areas in the ocean.”

Sylvia Earle (1935) American oceanographer

The National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration in: Effect of Violent Video Games on Kids; Dogs' Efforts to Keep Mail Safe; Spanish Government Sues Over Oil Spills http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0305/18/nac.00.html,CNN.com, May 18, 2003

Way, Behavior, Future

“I shall never forget the impression which our first landing on the beach of California make upon me. The sun had just gone down; it was getting dusky; the damp night wind was beginning to blow, and the heavy swell of the Pacific was setting in, and breaking in loud and high "combers" on the beach… we put our oars in the boat, and, leaving one to watch it, walked about the beach to see what we could of the place. The beach is nearly a mile in length between the two points, and of smooth sand… It was growing dark, so that we could just distinguish the dim outlines of the two vessels in the offing; and the great seas were rolling in in regular lines, growing larger and larger as they approached the shore, and hanging over the beach upon which they were to break, when their tops would curl over and turn white with foam, and, being at one extreme of the line, break rapidly to the other, as a child's long card house falls when a card is knocked down at one end.”

Richard Henry Dana Jr. book Two Years Before the Mast

Two Years Before the Mast (1840)

Sun, Housing, Night, Forgetting

“Whence do you have it that the terrestrial globe is so heavy? For my part, either I do not know what heaviness is, or the terrestrial globe is neither heavy nor light, as likewise all other globes of the universe. Heaviness to me (and I believe to Nature) is that innate tendency by which a body resists being moved from its natural place and by which, when forcibly removed therefrom, it spontaneously returns there. Thus a bucketful of water raised on high and set free, returns to the sea; but who will say that the same water remains heavy in the sea, when being set free there, does not move?”

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) Italian mathematician, physicist, philosopher and astronomer

Letter to Francesco Ingoli (1624)

Nature, Light, Universe, Water

“Some terror in the swishing tall grass seemed added to that of the diabolically pounding sea, and I started up crying aloud and disjointedly, "Tiger? Tiger? Is it Tiger? Beast? Beast? Is it a Beast that I am afraid of?"”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Fiction, The Crawling Chaos (1921)

Grass, Cry

“If it were not my purpose to combine barbarian things with things Hellenic, to traverse and civilize every continent, to search out the uttermost parts of land and sea, to push the bounds of Macedonia to the farthest Ocean, and to disseminate and shower the blessings of the Hellenic justice and peace over every nation, I should not be content to sit quietly in the luxury of idle power, but I should emulate the frugality of Diogenes. But as things are, forgive me Diogenes, that I imitate Herakles, and emulate Perseus, and follow in the footsteps of Dionysos, the divine author and progenitor of my family, and desire that victorious Hellenes should dance again in India and revive the memory of the Bacchic revels among the savage mountain tribes beyond the Kaukasos…”

Alexander the Great (-356–-323 BC) King of Macedon

As quoted in "On the Fortune of Alexander" by Plutarch, 332 a-b

Family, Peace, Justice, Search

“If you know how to launch your ship into God's sea
Oh, what a blessed fate, submerged in it to be”

Angelus Silesius (1624–1677) German writer

The Cherubinic Wanderer

God, Fate

“The sea with an end can be Greek or Roman:
the endless sea is Portuguese.”

Fernando Pessoa book Mensagem

Poem "Padrão", Versos 11-12
Message
Original: O mar com fim será grego ou romano:
O mar sem fim é português.

“I touch God in my song
as the hill touched the far-away sea
with its waterfall.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

42
Fireflies (1928)

God

“I have sinned against you, my Lord, and I would ask that your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain until it is in the seas of God's forgetfulness, never to be remembered against me anymore.”

Jimmy Swaggart (1935) pastor, musician, teacher, television host, televangelist

Source: Address to his congregation (21 February 1988), as quoted in The New Encyclopedia of American Scandal (2001) by George C. Kohn, p. 365

God, Forgetting

“There’s a magic in the distance, where the sea-line meets the sky.”

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) English poet

Forty Singing Seamen
Poems (1906)

“In a way, I suppose you could say my experience is quite limited. For example, I never locked Oliver Cromwell in a broom closet while singing "Waltzing Matilda." I never sawed a television in half, although I once saw Wendy O. Williams saw a guitar. I never played a decent game of jacks. I never played poker with a toothless one-eyed pirate who kept picking his teeth with a Bowie knife to distract me, while his parrot looked over my shoulder and told him what cards I had by using an elaborate code involving vomiting, chirping, and sea chanteys.”

John S. Hall (1960) Poet, author, singer, lawyer

"I'm Sorry"
Lyrics, Happy Hour (1992)

Way, Game, Singing

“A Loaf holds many grains of corn
And many myriad drops the Sea:
So is God's Oneness Multitude
And that great Multitude are we.”

Angelus Silesius (1624–1677) German writer

The Cherubinic Wanderer

God

“It is the fate of 'little faiths' of truth that they, true followers of Peter, whether they be Roman or the Protestant observance, cry out and sink in the sea of ideas, where the followers of Paul, believing in the Spirit, walk secure and undismayed.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Source: The Spiritual Life (1947), p. 32

Fate, Truth, Faith, Idea

“Thus ends the voyage under the seas. What passed during that night — how the boat escaped from the eddies of the maelstrom — how Ned Land, Conseil, and myself ever came out of the gulf, I cannot tell.”

Jules Verne book Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Voici la conclusion de ce voyage sous les mers. Ce qui se passa pendant cette nuit, comment le canot échappa au formidable remous du Maelstrom, comment Ned Land, Conseil et moi, nous sortîmes du gouffre, je ne saurai le dire.
Part II, ch. XXIII: Conclusion
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870)

Night

“Remember that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labor, and goes abroad, or sits idle, one half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he has really spent, rather thrown away, five shillings, besides.
“Remember, that credit is money. If a man lets his money lie in my hands after it is due, he gives me interest, or so much as I can make of it during that time. This amounts to a considerable sum where a man has good and large credit, and makes good use of it.
“Remember, that money is of the prolific, generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on. Five shillings turned is six, turned again it is seven and three pence, and so on, till it becomes a hundred pounds. The more there is of it, the more it produces every turning, so that the profits rise quicker and quicker. He that kills a breeding sow, destroys all her offspring to the thousandth generation. He that murders a crown, destroys all that it might have produced, even scores of pounds.”
“Remember this saying, The good paymaster is lord of another man’s purse. He that is known to pay punctually and exactly to the time he promises, may at any time, and on any occasion, raise all the money his friends can spare. This is sometimes of great use. After industry and frugality, nothing contributes more to the raising of a young man in the world than punctuality and justice in all his dealings; therefore never keep borrowed money an hour beyond the time you promised, lest a disappointment shut up your friend’s purse for ever.
“The most trifling actions that affect a man’s credit are to be regarded. The sound of your hammer at five in the morning, or eight at night, heard by a creditor, makes him easy six months longer; but if he sees you at a billiard table, or hears your voice at a tavern, when you should be at work, he sends for his money the next day; demands it, before he can receive it, in a lump. ‘It shows, besides, that you are mindful of what you owe; it makes you appear a careful as well as an honest man, and that still increases your credit.’
“Beware of thinking all your own that you possess, and of living accordingly. It is a mistake that many people who have credit fall into. To prevent this, keep an exact account for some time both of your expenses and your income. If you take the pains at first to mention particulars, it will have this good effect: you will discover how wonderfully small, trifling expenses mount up to large sums, and will discern what might have been, and may for the future be saved, without occasioning any great inconvenience.
“For six pounds a year you may have the use of one hundred pounds, provided you are a man of known prudence and honesty.
“He that spends a groat a day idly, spends idly above six pounds a year, which is the price for the use of one hundred pounds.
“He that wastes idly a groat’s worth of his time per day, one day with another, wastes the privilege of using one hundred pounds each day.
“He that idly loses five shillings’ worth of time, loses five shillings, and might as prudently throw five shillings into the sea.
“He that loses five shillings, not only loses that sum, but all the advantage that might be made by turning it in dealing, which by the time that a young man becomes old, will amount to a considerable sum of money.””

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Money, Pain, People, Lie

“All who have served the Revolution have plowed the sea.”

Simón Bolívar (1783–1830) Venezuelan military and political leader, South American libertador

Statement written in his final days, as quoted in Simón Bolívar : A Story of Courage (1941) by Elizabeth Dey Jenkinson Waugh, p. 320; These are sometimes said to have been repeated many times while he was dying, and to be his last words.
Variant translations or reports:
America is ungovernable; those who served the revolution have plowed the sea.
As quoted in Man, State, and Society in Latin American History (1972) by Sheldon B. Liss and Peggy K. Liss, p. 133
Those who have served the cause of the revolution have plowed the sea.
We have plowed the sea.
I plowed furrows in the ocean.
I have plowed the sea. Our America will fall into the hands of vulgar tyrants.

“She gazed, although she knew not why,
Where ocean seemed another sky.
The moon looked down upon the deep,
Till in that deep it seemed to be;
Scarce might the eye the image keep
Of which was sky, and which was sea.”

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

All from The Vow of the Peacock - First Canto
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

“I thought it would be a good thing to be a missionary, but I thought it would be better to be First Sea Lord.”

John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher (1841–1920) Royal Navy admiral of the fleet

p. 273. https://archive.org/stream/memoriesbyadmira00fishuoft#page/273/mode/1up Memories (1919) https://archive.org/stream/memoriesbyadmira00fishuoft#page/n0/mode/2up

“It is reported that there was then such perfect peace in Britain, wheresoever the dominion of King Edwin extended, that, as is still proverbially said, a woman with her newborn babe might walk throughout the island, from sea to sea, without receiving any harm.”
Tanta eo tempore pax in Britannia fuisse perhibetur, ut, sicut usque hodie in proverbio dicitur, etiamsi mulier una cum recens nato parvulo vellet totam perambulare insulam a mari ad mare, nullo se laedente valeret.

Bede book Ecclesiastical History of the English People

Book II, chapter 16
Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People)

Peace, Perfection

“This quiet roof, where dove-sails saunter by,
Between the pines, the tombs, throbs visibly.
Impartial noon patterns the sea in flame —
That sea forever starting and re-starting.
When thought has had its hour, oh how rewarding
Are the long vistas of celestial calm!”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes, Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes; Midi le juste y compose de feux La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée O récompense après une pensée Qu'un long regard sur le calme des dieux! Le Cimetière Marin · Online original and translation as "The Graveyard By The Sea" by C. Day Lewis http://unix.cc.wmich.edu/%7Ecooneys/poems/fr/valery.daylewis.html Variant translations: The sea, the ever renewing sea! Charmes ou poèmes (1922)

“Tormented by spiritual thirst,
I dragged myself through a somber desert.
And a six-winged seraph
Appeared to meet me at the crossing of the ways.
He touched my eyes
With fingers as light as a dream:
And my prophetic eyes opened
Like those of a frightened eagle.
He touched my ears
And they were filled with noise and ringing:
And I heard the shuddering of the heavens,
And the flight of the angels in the heights,
And the movement of the beasts of the sea under the waters,
And the sound of the vine growing in the valley.
He bent down to my mouth
And tore out my tongue,
Sinful, decitful, and given to idle talk;
with the right hand steeped in blood
He inserted the tongue of a wise serpent,
Into my benumbed mouth.
He clove my breast with a sword,
And plucked out my quivering heart,
And thrust a coal of live fire
Into my gaping breast.
Like a corpse I lay in the desert.
And the voice of God called out to me:
'Arise, O prophet, see and hear,
Be filled with my will,
Go forth over land and sea,
And set the hearts of men on fire with your Word.”

Aleksandr Pushkin The Prophet

English translation found in New Society, Volume 8, (1966). New Society Limited. p. 413.
Also quoted by Kahn, Andrew (2006). The Cambridge Companion to Pushkin. Cambridge University Press, p. 84.
The Prophet (1826)

Men, God, Dreams, Angels

“In Europe men and women have intercourse because they love each other. In the South Seas they love each other because they have had intercourse. Who is right?”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

Quoted by Bengt Danielsson in Gauguin in the South Seas http://books.google.com/books?id=u41CAAAAIAAJ&q=%22In+Europe+men+and+women+have+intercourse+because+they+love+each+other+In+the+South+Seas+they+love+each+other+because+they+have+had+intercourse+Who+is+right%22&pg=PA137#v=onepage (1966) undated

Love, Women, Men

“Some say he was a sailor who died away at sea
Some say he was a prisoner who never was set free
Lost upon the ocean he died there in the mist
Dreaming of a kiss
Bitter Green they called her walking in the sun
Loving everyone that she met
Bitter Green they called her waiting in the sun
Waiting for someone to take her home”

Gordon Lightfoot (1938) Canadian singer-songwriter

Bitter Green, Track 4, UNITED ARTISTS
Back Here On Earth (1968)

Love, Dreams, Home, Kiss

“As strong, as deep, as wide as is the sea,
Though by the wind made restless as the wind,
By billows fretted and by rocks confined,
So strong, so deep, so wide my love for thee.”

Francis William Bourdillon (1852–1921) British poet

"Sonnet II" in Scribner's Monthly Vol. IX (November 1874 - April 1875), p. 359.

Love, Strong

“Remember, every business firm, like even a mom and pop grocery store, is a market imperfection. A firm is defined in economic theory as a market imperfection introduced to deal with transaction costs. And the sort of theory is that the imperfections, the firms, are kinda like little islands in a free market sea. But the problem with that is that the sea doesn't remotely resemble a free market, and the islands are bigger than the sea; so that raises some questions about the picture. But these market imperfections, like a firm, or a transnational corporation, or a strategic alliance among them, this is a form of administering interchanges. And there's a real question about whether we want to accept that. Why, for example, should the international socioeconomic system, or for that matter our own society, be in the hands of unaccountable private tyrannies? That's a decision, it's not a law of nature.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Talk titled "U.S. Foreign Policy in a Globalized World" at Johns Hopkins University, Maryland, March 13, 2000 https://web.archive.org/web/20021220030406/http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/ed270/multimedia.html. Quotes 2000s, 2000

Law, Moms, Question, Business

“It is like reading of a land periodically devastated by hordes of lemmings or locusts; it is like turning from the history of a coral reef, in which every act and every death is a foundation, to the depressing chronicle of a succession of castles built on the waste sand of the sea-shore. This is Woodruff on the difference between European history and Indian history. He has chosen his images well. But the sandcastle is not quite exact. The sandcastle is flattened by the tide and leaves not trace, and India is above all the land of ruins.”

V.S. Naipaul book An Area of Darkness

An Area of Darkness (1964)

Death, History, Reading, Success

“Once when Bion was at sea in the company of some wicked men, he fell into the hands of pirates; and when the rest said, "We are undone if we are known," – "But I," said he, "am undone if we are not known."”

Bion of Borysthenes (-325–-246 BC) ancient greek philosopher

As quoted by Diogenes Laërtius, iv. 50.

Men

“I arrived at length at Cairo, mother of cities and seat of Pharaoh the tyrant, mistress of broad regions and fruitful lands, boundless in multitude of buildings, peerless in beauty and splendour, the meeting-place of comer and goer, the halting-place of feeble and mighty, whose throngs surge as the waves of the sea, and can scarce be contained in her for all her size and capacity.”

Ibn Battuta (1304–1377) Moroccan explorer

Travels in Asia and Africa (Rehalã of Ibn Battûta)

Beauty

“A good watch may serve to keep a recconing at Sea for some days and to know the time of a Celestial Observ[at]ion: and for this end a good Jewel watch may suffice till a better sort of Watch can be found out. But when the Longitude at sea is once lost, it cannot be found again by any watch.”

Isaac Newton (1643–1727) British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern classical physics

Letter to Josiah Burchett (1721), quoted in Longitude (1995) by Dava Sobel, p. 60
Board of Longitude

Time

“At night the sea is very loud,
And voices ride the tide.
At another time, in another place,
Beneath the silent moon,
We laughed together.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Cauldron (2007), Chapter 30 (p. 279)

Time, Night

“I am the bond slave of my devotee. I love devotion. He who withdraws his heart from the world and loves me is my true lover and he merges in Me like a river in the sea.”

Sai Baba of Shirdi (1836–1918) Hindu and muslim saint

Saying stated to his disciples

Love, World, Lovers, Heart

“Now the nature of man being ever prone to idolatry from the beginning of the world, and the Papists being ready by all means and policy to defend and extol the mass, for their estimation and profit; and the people being superstitiously enamored and doted upon the mass (because they take it for a present remedy against all manners of evils); and part of the princes being blinded by papistical doctrine part loving quietness, and loth to offend their clergy and subjects, and all being captives and subjects to the antichrist of Rome; the state of the world remaining in this case, it is no wonder that abuses grew and increased in the church, that superstition with idolatry were taken for godliness and true religion, and that many things were brought in without the authority of Christ as purgatory, the oblation and sacrificing of Christ by the priest alone; the application and appointing of the same to such persons as the priests would sing or say mass for, and to such abuses, as they could devise; to deliver some from purgatory, and some from hell (if they were not there finally by God determined to abide, as they termed the matter); to hallow and preserve them that went to Jerusalem, to Rome, to St. James in Compostella, and to other places in pilgrimage; for a preservative against tempest and thunder, against perils and dangers of the sea, fora remedy against murrain of cattle, against pensiveness of the heart, and against all manner of affliction and tribulation”

Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556) leader of the English Reformation and Archbishop of Canterbury

Ibid, pp. 517-518, (1809)

Love, God, People, World

“20 million other white rappers emerge, but no matter how many fish in the sea, it'll be so empty without me!”

Eminem (1972) American rapper and actor

"Without Me"
2000s, The Eminem Show (2002)

Fish

“Within a few years a simple and inexpensive device, readily carried about, will enable one to receive on land or sea the principal news, to hear a speech, a lecture, a song or play of a musical instrument, conveyed from any other region of the globe. The invention will also meet the crying need for cheap transmission to great distances, more especially over the oceans. The small working capacity of the cables and the excessive cost of messages are now fatal impediments in the dissemination of intelligence which can only be removed by transmission without wires.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

A Means for Furthering Peace (1905)

Music, Intelligence, Cry

“[While working beneath the cliff at Manneport, Normandy] I didn't see a huge wave coming; it threw me against the cliff and I was tossed about in its wake along with all my materials! My immediate thought was that I was done for, as the water dragged me down, but in the end I managed to clamber out on all fours, but Lord, what a state I was in! My boots, my thick stockings and my coat were soaked through. The palette which I had kept a grip on had been knocked over my face and my beard was covered in blue, yellow etc. But anyway, now the excitement is passed and no harm's done, the worst of it was that I lost my painting which was very soon broken up, along with my easel, bag etc. Impossible to fish anything out. Besides, everything was torn to shreds by the sea, that "old hag" as you sister calls her.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

in a letter from Etretat to Alice Hoschedé, 1884; as quoted in: Howard F. Isham (2004) Image of the Sea: Oceanic Consciousness in the Romantic Century. p. 337
1870 - 1890

Fish, Sister, Water, Painting

“People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering.”

Aurelius Augustinus book Confessions

Variant: Men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, and pass themselves by.
Source: Confessions (c. 397), X

People, Travel, Mountain, Star

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

Meindert DeJong book The House of Sixty Fathers

The House of Sixty Fathers (1956)

Night

“A little while ago, I stood by the grave of the old Napoleon, a magnificent tomb, and I gazed upon the sarcophagus of rare and nameless marble, where rest at last the ashes of that restless man. I leaned over the balustrade and thought about the career of the greatest soldier of the modern world. I saw him walking upon the banks of the Seine, contemplating suicide. I saw him at Toulon—I saw him putting down the mob in the streets of Paris—I saw him at the head of the army of Italy—I saw him crossing the bridge of Lodi with the tri-color in his hand—I saw him in Egypt in the shadows of the pyramids—I saw him conquer the Alps and mingle the eagles of France with the eagles of the crags. I saw him at Marengo—at Ulm and Austerlitz. I saw him in Russia, where the infantry of the snow and the cavalry of the wild blast scattered his legions like winter's withered leaves. I saw him at Leipsic in defeat and disaster—driven by a million bayonets back upon Paris—clutched like a wild beast—banished to Elba. I saw him escape and retake an empire by the force of his genius. I saw him upon the frightful field of Waterloo, where Chance and Fate combined to wreck the fortunes of their former king. And I saw him at St. Helena, with his hands crossed behind him, gazing out upon the sad and solemn sea. I thought of the orphans and widows he had made—of the tears that had been shed for his glory, and of the only woman who ever loved him, pushed from his heart by the cold hand of ambition. And I said I would rather have been a French peasant and worn wooden shoes. I would rather have lived in a hut with a vine growing over the door, and the grapes growing purple in the kisses of the autumn sun. I would rather have been that poor peasant with my loving wife by my side, knitting as the day died out of the sky—with my children upon my knees and their arms about me—I would rather have been that man and gone down to the tongueless silence of the dreamless dust, than to have been that imperial impersonation of force and murder, known as 'Napoleon the Great.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Robert G. Ingersoll, The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child
About

Love, Fate, Children, World

“"Grant me, ye gods, but one certainty," runs Parmenides' prayer, "and if it be but a log's breadth on which to lie. on which to ride upon the sea of uncertainty. Take away everything that comes-to-be, everything lush, colorful, blossoming, illusory, everything that charms and is alive. Take all these for yourselves and grant me but the one and only, poor empty certainty.””

Friedrich Nietzsche book Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

Source: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (posthumous), p. 81

God, Lie, Color

“Do not wade far out into the dangerous sea of this world's comfort. Take the good that God provides you, but say of it, "It passeth away;" for, indeed, it is but a temporary supply for a temporary need. Never suffer your goods to become your God.”

Charles Spurgeon (1834–1892) British preacher, author, pastor and evangelist

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 207.

God, World, Suffering

“The human mind delights in grand conceptions of supernatural beings. And the sea is precisely their best vehicle, the only medium through which these giants (against which terrestrial animals, such as elephants or rhinoceroses, are as nothing) can be produced or developed”

Jules Verne book Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

L'esprit humain se plaît à ces conceptions grandioses d'êtres surnaturels. Or la mer est précisément leur meilleur véhicule, le seul milieu où ces géants près desquels les animaux terrestres, éléphants ou rhinocéros, ne sont que des nains — puissent se produire et se développer.
Part I, ch. II: Pro and Con
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870)

Animals

“The fish in the water is silent, the animal on the earth is noisy, the bird in the air is singing, But Man has in him the silence of the sea, the noise of the earth and the music of the air.”

Rabindranath Tagore Stray Birds

43
Stray Birds (1916)

Music, Bird, Fish, Silence