Quotes about the sea
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“The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.”

Kate Chopin book The Awakening

Source: The Awakening (1899)

Soul, Solitude

“I have bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea…
Devouring the green azures.”

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Decadent and Symbolist poet

Je me suis baigné dans le Poème De la Mer... Dévorant les azurs verts. St. 6 Le Bateau Ivre http://www.mag4.net/Rimbaud/poesies/Boat.html (The Drunken Boat) (1871)

“Death,
I need my little addiction to you.
need that tiny voice who,
even as I rise from the sea,
all woman, all there,
says kill me, kill me.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

"Letters to Dr. Y."
Words for Dr. Y (1978)

Death

“when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.”

Kenneth Grahame book The Wind in the Willows

Source: The Wind in the Willows

World, Heart

“Men really do need sea-monsters in their personal oceans”

John Steinbeck book The Log from the Sea of Cortez

Source: The Log from the Sea of Cortez

Men, Personality

“Sitting over words
Very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing
Not far
Like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark
The echo of everything that has ever
Been spoken
Still spinning its one syllable
Between the earth and silence”

W.S. Merwin (1927–2019) American poet

Silence, Night

“There is no beauty or romance or mystery in the sea except for the men that sail abroad upon it, and those who stay at home and dream of them.”

Lord Dunsany (1878–1957) Irish writer and dramatist

Men, Beauty, Dreams, Home

“No man is an island,' said John Donne. I feel we are all islands -- in a common sea.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh book Gift from the Sea

Source: Gift from the Sea

Feeling

“I will not have a sea creature destroyed, if I can help it. And I can help it.”

Rick Riordan book The Titan's Curse

Source: The Titan's Curse

Help

“And if my choice is to sit graciously in my best robes and accept the inevitable or to bail a sea with a bucket, give me the bucket.”

Robin McKinley Chalice

Source: Chalice

“I pass with relief from the tossing sea of Cause and Theory to the firm ground of Result and Fact.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Story of the Malakand Field Force

Early career years (1898–1929)
Source: The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War (1898), Chapter III.

“Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Variant: Reality is, you know, the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we've managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal.

Reality

“The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the globe . . . The sea is only a receptacle for all the prodigious, supernatural things that exist inside it. It is only movement and love; it is the living infinite.”

Anthony Doerr book All the Light We Cannot See

Source: All the Light We Cannot See

Love

“I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.”

Siri Hustvedt book The Summer Without Men

Source: The Summer Without Men

Star

“It also occurred to him that throughout history, humankind has told two stories: the story of a lost ship sailing the Mediterranean seas in quest of a beloved isle, and the story of a god who allows himself to be crucified on Golgotha.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Source: Collected Fictions

God, History

“No miles of level desert, no jagged mountain heights, no sea of endless blue
Neither words nor tears, nor silent fears
will keep me from coming back to you.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Again the Magic

Fear, Mountain, Tear

“O what a blessed day that will be when I shall… stand on the shore and look back on the raging seas I have safely passed; when I shall review my pains and sorrows, my fears and tears, and possess the glory which was the end of all!”

Richard Baxter (1615–1691) English Puritan church leader, poet, and hymn-writer

Pain, Fear, Tear, Rage

“I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me.”

N. Scott Momaday (1934) American author

Dreams, Night

“She still felt like a punked-out, faux-leather-wearing, free-thinking Bratz doll in a sea of Pretty Princess of Preppyland Barbies.”

Sara Shepard book Perfect

Source: Perfect

Thinking, Princess

“There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand. I am practically industrious — painstaking, a workman to execute with perseverance and labour — but besides this there is a love for the marvellous, a belief in the marvellous, intertwined in all my projects, which hurries me out of the common pathways of men, even to the wild sea and unvisited regions I am about to explore.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Robert Walton in "Letter 2"
Source: Frankenstein (1818)

Love, Men, Soul, Understanding

“The voice of the sea speaks to the soul.”

Kate Chopin book The Awakening

Source: The Awakening

Soul

“How still,
How strangely still
The water is today,
It is not good
For water
To be so still that way.

~ "Sea Calm”

Langston Hughes (1902–1967) American writer and social activist

Way, Water

“I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Sadness

“The boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

“There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Wise Man's Fear

Source: The Wise Man's Fear (2011), Chapter 43, “The Flickering Way” (p. 318)

Men, Fear, Anger, Night

“The northern lights rise like a kiss to the sea”

Arthur Rimbaud Le Bateau ivre

Source: Le Bateau ivre

Kiss, Light

“Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 347
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

Drink, Water, Wealth, Cute

“If you put Durant's brains in a thimble full of water they'd look like a ship lost in the middle of the sea.”

Scott Lynch The Lies of Locke Lamora

Source: The Lies of Locke Lamora

Water

“When this is over… we will got to the rainforest, or a beach as white as bone. We will eat grapes from the vine, we will swim with sea turtles, we will walk miles on cobblestone streets. We will laugh and talk and confess. We will.”

Jodi Picoult book Nineteen Minutes

Source: Nineteen Minutes

“Finally, by the sea, where God is everywhere, I gradually calmed.”

Patti Smith (1946) American singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist

God

“Some love comes like the wind off the sea, while others grow slowly from the seeds of friendship and kindness." - Carline”

Raymond E. Feist (1945) Novelist

Variant: Some loves come unbidden like winds from the sea, and others grow from the seeds of friendship.
Source: Magician: Apprentice

Love, Friendship

“Two lost things that had survived the seas and arrived on a coastline. What did they do? They implanted themselves in the sand and grew into trees and lined the beaches. Sometimes a lot can come of being all washed up. You can really grow.”

Cecelia Ahern (1981) Irish novelist

Source: The Book of Tomorrow

Tree

“The roaring seas and many a dark range of mountains lie between us.”

Homér Iliad

Source: The Iliad

Lie, Mountain

“We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Powerful

“When you loved me I gave you the whole sun and stars to play with. I gave you eternity in a single moment, strength of the mountains in one clasp of your arms, and the volume of all the seas in one impulse of your soul.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Love, Soul, Mountain, Star

“The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

Children, Faith, Lovers, Light

“I felt like time was a great sea, and I was floating on the back of a turtle, and no sails broke the horizon.”

Janet Fitch book White Oleander

Source: White Oleander

Time

“To subdue one's self to one's own ends might be dangerous, but to subdue one's self to other people's ends was dust and ashes. Yet there were those, still more unhappy, who envied even the ashy saltness of those dead sea apples.”

Dorothy L. Sayers book Gaudy Night

Source: Gaudy Night

People, Envy, Dead

“I imagined loading the God of the Sea into a taxi and taking him to the Upper East Side.”

Rick Riordan book The Lightning Thief

Source: The Lightning Thief

God, Imagination

“Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel?”

Ernest Hemingway book The Old Man and the Sea

Source: The Old Man and the Sea

Bird

“The boy was standing alone as though the broken glass all around him were a shining sea and he were an island.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: The Midnight Heir

Boy

“Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

“So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.”

Roald Dahl book Matilda

Source: Matilda

Books, World, Hope, Strong

“If Bacchus ever had a color he could claim for his own, it should surely be the shade of tannin on drunken lips, of John Keat's 'purple-stained mouth', or perhaps even of Homer's dangerously wine-dark sea.”

Victoria Finlay (1964) British journalist

Color, Wine

“How simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea.... All that is required to feel that here and now is happiness is a simple, frugal heart.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book Zorba the Greek

Source: Zorba the Greek (1946), Ch. 7

Happiness, Feeling, Wine, Heart

“Like a mermaid in sea-weed, she dreams awake, trembling in her soft and chilly nest.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Dreams

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

Ben Sherwood book The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud

Source: The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud

Love, Star, Heart, Wise

“His blue eyes were seas where sorrow sailed.”

Dean Koontz book From the Corner of His Eye

Source: From the Corner of His Eye

“In truth, nothing was the same. She forgot about the stars… and taking notice of the sea. She was no longer filled with all the curiosities of the world and didn’t take much notice of anything… other than how heavy… and awkward the bottle had become.”

Oliver Jeffers (1977) British writer and illustrator

Source: The Heart and the Bottle

Truth, World, Star

“We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”

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

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
Source: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems
Context: I grow old … I grow old...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Girl