Quotes about shore

A collection of quotes on the topic of shore, sea, likeness, world.

Quotes about shore

Michael Jackson photo

“Did you ever stop to notice
All the children dead from war?
Did you ever stop to notice
This crying earth, these weeping shores?”

Michael Jackson (1958–2009) American singer, songwriter and dancer

Earth Song
HIStory: Past, Present & Future, Book I (1995)

Tove Jansson photo
William Faulkner photo
Isaac Newton photo

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

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

Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (1855) by Sir David Brewster (Volume II. Ch. 27). Compare: "As children gath'ring pebbles on the shore", John Milton, Paradise Regained, Book iv. Line 330

Aryabhata photo
Hunter S. Thompson photo

“Who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived, or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

"Security" (1951); excerpted in Outlaw Journalist: The Life & Times of Hunter S. Thompson (2008), page 15
1950s

Jeff Buckley photo
Dante Alighieri photo
Dante Alighieri photo

“And just as he who, with exhausted breath,
having escaped from the sea to shore,
turns to the perilous waters and gazes.”

Canto I, lines 22–24 (tr. Mandelbaum).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Inferno

Pablo Neruda photo

“It is time, love, to break off that sombre rose,
shut up the stars and bury the ash in the earth;
and, in the rising of the light, wake with those who awoke
or go on in the dream, reaching the other shore of the sea which has no other shore.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Es la hora, amor mío, de apartar esta rosa sombría,
cerrar las estrellas, enterrar la ceniza en la tierra:
y, en la insurrección de la luz, despertar con los que despertaron
o seguir en el sueño alcanzando la otra orilla del mar que no tiene otra orilla.
La Barcarola Termina (The Watersong Ends) (1967), trans. Anthony Kerrigan in Selected Poems by Pablo Neruda [Houghton Mifflin, 1990, ISBN 0-395-54418-1] (p. 500).

Alexis Karpouzos photo
William Shakespeare photo
J.M.W. Turner photo
Carl Sagan photo

“We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.”

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 193
Context: We embarked on our journey to the stars with a question first framed in the childhood of our species and in each generation asked anew with undiminished wonder: What are the stars? Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.

Eugene V. Debs photo
T.C. Boyle photo
Phillis Wheatley photo
Richard Feynman photo
Dante Alighieri photo

“Hope nevermore to look upon the heavens;
I come to lead you to the other shore,
To the eternal shades in heat and frost.”

Canto III, lines 85–87 (tr. Longfellow).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Inferno

Taras Shevchenko photo
Benjamin Disraeli photo
James Madison photo

“The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Though this had been cited as being from a letter objecting to the use of government land for churches in 1803 https://web.archive.org/web/20061123043628/http://www.positiveatheism.org///hist/quotes/madison.htm#PHONYMAD, as quoted in 2000 Years of Disbelief: Famous People With the Courage to Doubt (1996) edited by James A Haught, no original source for this has yet been found.
Misattributed

Robert Frost photo
Tamora Pierce photo
Libba Bray photo
Khaled Hosseini photo
William Shakespeare photo
Guy Gavriel Kay photo
John Archibald Wheeler photo
Alan Alda photo
Phillis Wheatley photo

“But, Madam, let your grief be laid aside,
And let the fountain of your tears be dry'd,
In vain they flow to wet the dusty plain,
Your sighs are wafted to the skies in vain,
Your pains they witness, but they can no more,
While Death reigns tyrant o'er this mortal shore.”

Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784) American poet

"To a Gentleman and Lady on the Death of the Lady's Brother and Sister, and a Child of the Name of Avis, aged one Year." st. 2, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773)

Edgar Allan Poe photo
Richard Henry Dana Jr. photo

“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)

Richard Henry Dana Jr. photo
Charles Spurgeon photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo
Barack Obama photo
Edgar Allan Poe photo
Albert Schweitzer photo

“Most men are scantily nourished on a modicum of happiness and a number of empty thoughts which life lays on their plates. They are kept in the road of life through stern necessity by elemental duties which they cannot avoid.
Again and again their will-to-live becomes, as it were, intoxicated: spring sunshine, opening flowers, moving clouds, waving fields of grain — all affect it. The manifold will-to-live, which is known to us in the splendid phenomena in which it clothes itself, grasps at their personal wills. They would fain join their shouts to the mighty symphony which is proceeding all around them. The world seem beauteous…but the intoxication passes. Dreadful discords only allow them to hear a confused noise, as before, where they had thought to catch the strains of glorious music. The beauty of nature is obscured by the suffering which they discover in every direction. And now they see again that they are driven about like shipwrecked persons on the waste of ocean, only that the boat is at one moment lifted high on the crest of the waves and a moment later sinks deep into the trough; and that now sunshine and now darkening clouds lie on the surface of the water.
And now they would fain persuade themselves that land lies on the horizon toward which they are driven. Their will-to-live befools their intellect so that it makes efforts to see the world as it would like to see it. It forces this intellect to show them a map which lends support to their hope of land. Once again they essay to reach the shore, until finally their arms sink exhausted for the last time and their eyes rove desperately from wave to wave. …
Thus it is with the will-to-live when it is unreflective.
But is there no way out of this dilemma? Must we either drift aimlessly through lack of reflection or sink in pessimism as the result of reflection? No. We must indeed attempt the limitless ocean, but we may set our sails and steer a determined course.”

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

Source: The Spiritual Life (1947), p. 256

Joseph Conrad photo

“Above all, we must forgive the unhappy souls who have elected to make the pilgrimage on foot, who skirt the shore and look uncomprehendingly upon the horror of the struggle, the joy of victory, the profound hopelessness of the vanquished.”

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) Polish-British writer

Letter (March 1890), published in The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, Vol. 1, p. 43 ISBN 0521242169

V.S. Naipaul photo
José Saramago photo
John Updike photo

“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Hugging the Shore, foreword (1983)

Cesare Pavese photo

“What world lies beyond that stormy sea I do not know, but every ocean has a distant shore, and I shall reach it.”

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

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

Barack Obama photo

“When we think of the major threats to our national security, the first to come to mind are nuclear proliferation, rogue states and global terrorism. But another kind of threat lurks beyond our shores, one from nature, not humans — an avian flu pandemic.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

New York Times Op-Ed "Grounding a Pandemic" (6 June 2005) http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/06/opinion/06obama.html?ex=1275710400&en=69f51e47097d5dd9&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss by Barack Obama and Richard Lugar
2005

Cristoforo Colombo photo

“One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”

Cristoforo Colombo (1451–1506) Explorer, navigator, and colonizer

Misattributed

F. Anstey photo

“Two or three days at sea are equivalent to at least as many weeks on shore.”

F. Anstey (1856–1934) English novelist and journalist

Prologue
Tourmalin's Time Cheques (1885)

Peter Ustinov photo

“I'd rather be buried at sea than on the shore when I come to die. Will you stand by the plank, mates, so I can shake a friendly hand before I sink?”

Peter Ustinov (1921–2004) English actor, writer, and dramatist

Billy Budd
Billy Budd (1962)

George William Russell photo
Barack Obama photo

“You were born as freedom forced its way through a wall in Berlin, and tore down an Iron Curtain across Europe. You were educated in an era of instant information that put the world’s accumulated knowledge at your fingertips. And you came of age as terror touched our shores; an historic recession spread across the nation; and a new generation signed up to go to war. 
You have been tested and tempered by events that your parents and I never imagined we’d see when we sat where you sit.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2013, Commencement Address at Ohio State University (May 2013)
Context: You were born as freedom forced its way through a wall in Berlin, and tore down an Iron Curtain across Europe. You were educated in an era of instant information that put the world’s accumulated knowledge at your fingertips. And you came of age as terror touched our shores; an historic recession spread across the nation; and a new generation signed up to go to war. 
You have been tested and tempered by events that your parents and I never imagined we’d see when we sat where you sit. And yet, despite all this, or more likely because of it, yours has become a generation possessed with that most American of ideas – that people who love their country can change it. For all the turmoil; for all the times you have been let down, or frustrated at the hand you’ve been dealt; what I have seen from your generation are perennial and quintessentially American values. Altruism. Empathy. Tolerance. Community. And a deep sense of service that makes me optimistic for our future.

Barack Obama photo

“The American people did not choose this fight. It came to our shores, and started with the senseless slaughter of our citizens.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2011, Remarks on death of Osama bin Laden (May 2011)
Context: The American people did not choose this fight. It came to our shores, and started with the senseless slaughter of our citizens. After nearly 10 years of service, struggle, and sacrifice, we know well the costs of war. These efforts weigh on me every time I, as Commander-in-Chief, have to sign a letter to a family that has lost a loved one, or look into the eyes of a service member who’s been gravely wounded.
So Americans understand the costs of war. Yet as a country, we will never tolerate our security being threatened, nor stand idly by when our people have been killed. We will be relentless in defense of our citizens and our friends and allies. We will be true to the values that make us who we are. And on nights like this one, we can say to those families who have lost loved ones to al Qaeda’s terror: Justice has been done.

Barack Obama photo

“This man is now safely on our shores. 
Having recovered these two men who sacrificed for our country, I’m now taking steps to place the interests of the people of both countries at the heart of our policy.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2014, Statement on Cuban policy (December 2014)
Context: While I have been prepared to take additional steps for some time, a major obstacle stood in our way –- the wrongful imprisonment, in Cuba, of a U. S. citizen and USAID sub-contractor Alan Gross for five years. Over many months, my administration has held discussions with the Cuban government about Alan’s case, and other aspects of our relationship. His Holiness Pope Francis issued a personal appeal to me, and to Cuba’s President Raul Castro, urging us to resolve Alan’s case, and to address Cuba’s interest in the release of three Cuban agents who have been jailed in the United States for over 15 years.
Today, Alan returned home –- reunited with his family at long last. Alan was released by the Cuban government on humanitarian grounds. Separately, in exchange for the three Cuban agents, Cuba today released one of the most important intelligence agents that the United States has ever had in Cuba, and who has been imprisoned for nearly two decades. This man, whose sacrifice has been known to only a few, provided America with the information that allowed us to arrest the network of Cuban agents that included the men transferred to Cuba today, as well as other spies in the United States. This man is now safely on our shores. 
Having recovered these two men who sacrificed for our country, I’m now taking steps to place the interests of the people of both countries at the heart of our policy.

Marcin Malek photo
Al Capone photo
Billy Hughes photo

“Australia was born on the shores of Gallipoli.”

Billy Hughes (1862–1952) Australian politician, seventh prime minister of Australia

Undated
Source: Inscribed in the Australian War Memorial, quoted in Joan Beaumont, ‘'Unitedly we have fought': imperial loyalty and the Australian war effort’, International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-), Vol. 90, No. 2, The Great War (March 2014), p. 399

Edgar Allan Poe photo

“Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken!”

quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"
Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."
Stanza 17.
The Raven (1844)

Maya Angelou photo
Ray Bradbury photo
Gabrielle Zevin photo
André Gide photo

“One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore.”

On ne découvre pas de terre nouvelle sans consentir à perdre de vue, d'abord et longtemps, tout rivage.
Often misquoted as "Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore."
Frequently misattributed to Christopher Columbus.
Variant: Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
Source: Les faux-monnayeurs [The Counterfeiters] (1925)

Garth Brooks photo

“The dream is like a river, ever changing as it flows and the dreamer just a vessel that must follow where it goes. We must lean from what's behind us never knowing what's in store keeps each day a contant battle just to stay between the shore”

Garth Brooks (1962) American country music artist

The River, written by Victoria Shaw and G. Brooks.
Song lyrics, Ropin' the Wind (1991)
Context: You know a dream is like a river,
Ever changin' as it flows.
And a dreamer's just a vessel
That must follow where it goes.
Trying to learn from what's behind you,
And never knowing what's in store
Makes each day a constant battle
Just to stay between the shores... andI will sail my vessel
'Til the river runs dry.
Like a bird upon the wind,
These waters are my sky.
I'll never reach my destination
If I never try.
So I will sail my vessel
'Til the river runs dry.

John Keats photo
Zora Neale Hurston photo

“Love is like the sea. It's a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets, and it's different with every shore.”

Variant: Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.
Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God

George Gordon Byron photo
Victor Hugo photo
T.S. Eliot photo

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih”

The final lines of the poem.
The Waste Land (1922)
Source: The Waste Land and Other Poems

Pablo Neruda photo
Denise Levertov photo
Jean-Dominique Bauby photo
E.M. Forster photo
Emma Lazarus photo
Seamus Heaney photo
T.S. Eliot photo
Diane Ackerman photo
Donna Tartt photo
Richard Bach photo
Richard Baxter photo
Sarah Dessen photo
Margaret George photo
Tom Stoppard photo
Emily Brontë photo
Gail Carson Levine photo
William Blake photo

“Fiery the Angels rose, and as they rose deep thunder roll'd
Around their shores: indignant burning with the fires of Orc.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

America, A Prophecy.
1800s
Source: America: A Prophecy/Europe: A Prophecy: Facsimile Reproductions of Two Illuminated Books

Cassandra Clare photo
Walt Whitman photo
Jeanette Winterson photo
Florence Nightingale photo
Idries Shah photo
James Joyce photo
Sherrilyn Kenyon photo
Libba Bray photo
Robinson Jeffers photo
Tom Stoppard photo
Maya Angelou photo