“Leave the earth to the strong and athletic,
And the sea to adventure upon.
But the sun and the sand
No contractor can copy;
We lie in the land
Of the lotus and poppy;
We vegetate, calm and aesthetic,
On the beach, on the sand, in the sun.”
Many Long Years Ago (1945), Pretty Halcyon Days
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Ogden Nash 125
American poet 1902–1971Related quotes

“Those worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the earth.”
54 min 55 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), Journeys in Space and Time [Episode 8]
Context: Those worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the earth. Each of those worlds is as real as ours and every one of them is a succession of incidents, events, occurrences which influence its future. Countless worlds, numberless moments, an immensity of space and time. And our small planet at this moment, here we face a critical branch point in history, what we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants, it is well within our power to destroy our civilization and perhaps our species as well. If we capitulate to superstition or greed or stupidity we could plunge our world into a time of darkness deeper than the time between the collapse of classical civilization and the Italian Renaissance. But we are also capable of using our compassion and our intelligence, our technology and our wealth to make an abundant and meaningful life for every inhabitant of this planet.

“We were making sand castles. Now we swim in the sea that swept them away”
What Ever Happened to Urbanism? http://www.arhns.uns.ac.rs/wp-content/uploads/Arch432_koolhaas.pdf The Monicelli Press, New York, 1995, pp. 959/971.

Each and All, st. 3
1840s, Poems (1847)
Variant: I wiped away the weeds and foam,
And fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore
With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar.

“The glad indomitable sea,
The strong white sun.”
A Sea Child, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“We build upon the sand, and the older we become, the more unstable this foundation becomes.”

“Now we can cross the Shifting Sands.”
Last words, to his wife Maud (6 May 1919), as quoted in Uncovering Lives : The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology (1994) by Alan C. Elms, p. 154