Sea Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

It is better to meet danger than to wait for it. He that is on a lee shore, and foresees a hurricane, stands out to sea and encounters a storm to avoid a shipwreck.

Charles Caleb Colton

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drowned, he said, for he will be going out on a day he shouldn't. But we do be afraid of the sea, and we do only be drownded now and again.

John Millington Synge

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

There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates.

James Russell Lowell

The grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the death of one woman over eighty years, but seems to contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island. In this cry of pain the inner consciousness of the people seems to lay itself bare for an instant, and to reveal the mood of beings who feel their isolation in the face of a universe that wars on them with winds and seas.

John Millington Synge

Power? It's like a Dead Sea fruit. When you achieve it, there is nothing there.

Harold Macmillan

On the last morning of Virginia's bloodiest year since the Civil War, I built a fire and sat facing a window of darkness where at sunrise I knew I would find the sea.

Patricia Cornwell

Pleasant it is, when over a great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from shore upon another's tribulation: not because any man's troubles are a delectable joy, but because to perceive from what ills you are free yourself is pleasant.

Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas,
Ease after war, death after life does greatly please.

It has long been a fact familiar to geologists, that, both on the east and west coasts of the central part of Scotland, there are lines of raised beaches, containing marine shells of the same species as those now inhabiting the neighbouring sea.

For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed to feel for it, for all the celebrations it had been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

I don't see America as a mainland, but as a sea, a big ocean. Sometimes a storm arises, a formidable current develops, and it seems it will engulf everything. Wait a moment, another current will appear and bring the first one to naught.

Jacques Maritain

The sea from Dunkirk to Dover during these days of the evacuation looked like any coastal road in England on a bank holiday. It was solid with shipping.

Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man; the power that crosses the white sea, driven by the stormy wind, making a path under surges that threaten to engulf him...

We are as near to heaven by sea as by land!

Humphrey Gilbert

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

You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world.

Thomas Traherne

Now there was a young gentleman which had married a merchant's wife. And having a little wanton money, which him thought burned out the bottom of his purse, in the first year of his wedding took his wife with him and went over sea, for none other errand but to see Flanders and France and ride out one summer in those countries.

Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.

Publilius Syrus

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 infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

H. P. Lovecraft

Why do we love the sea? It is because it has some potent power to make us think things we like to think.

Exultation is the going Of an inland soul to sea Past the houses, past the headlands Into deep eternity! Bred as we, among the mountains Can the sailor understand The divine intoxication Of the first league out from land?

Emily Dickinson

And Ye take mine honour from me if Ye take away the sea!

Rudyard Kipling

Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.

Ernest Hemingway