Sea Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Let a man attain the highest and broadest culture that any American has possessed, then let him die by sea-storm, railroad collision, or other accident, and all America will acquiesce that the best thing has happened to him; that, after the education has gone far, such is the expensiveness of America, that the best use to put a fine person to is to drown him to save his board.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the face of so many wounds that hurt us and could lead to a hardness of heart, we are called to dive into the sea of prayer, which is the sea of the boundless love of God, in order to experience his tenderness

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

With my mother's death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.

I have myself seen what once was solid land changed into sea; and again I have seen land made from the sea.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it-just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

One must fill oneself with human science. Above all and in spite of all, be a man. Do not fear to surcharge yourself with humanity. Ballast your mind with reality and then throw yourself into the sea — the sea of inspiration.

The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.

Ernest Hemingway

It is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, ina government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone.

Henry David Thoreau

You cannot make an oyster out of whole cloth, you must make the oyster's ancestor first. This is not done in a day. You must make a vast variety or invertebrates, to start with — belemnites, trilobites, jebustites, Amalekites, and that sort of fry, and put them to soak in a primary sea, and wait and see what will happen.

All that is told of the sea has a fabulous sound to an inhabitant of the land and all its products have a certain fabulous quality, as if they belonged to another planet.

Henry David Thoreau

The sea is the chemist that dissolves the mountains and the rocks, pulverizes old continents and builds new, forever redistributing the solid matter of the globe.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Long ago, Sir Isaac Newton gave us three laws of motion, which were the work of genius. But Sir Isaac's talents didn't extend to investing: He lost a bundle in the South Sea Bubble, explaining later, "I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men." If he had not been traumatized by this loss, Sir Isaac might well have gone on to discover the Fourth Law of Motion: For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases.

What do the botanists know? Our lives should go between the lichen and the bark. The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind. We are still being born, and have as yet but a dim vision of sea and land, sun, moon, and stars, and shall not see clearly till after nine days at least.

Henry David Thoreau

If you condemn painting, which is the only imitator of all visible works of nature, you will certainly despise a subtle invention which brings philosophy and subtle speculation to the consideration of the nature of all forms — seas and plains, trees, animals, plants and flowers — which are surrounded by shade and light. And this is true knowledge and the legitimate issue of nature; for painting is born of nature — or, to speak more correctly, we will say it is the grandchild of nature; for all visible things are produced by nature, and these her children have given birth to painting. Hence we may justly call it the grandchild of nature and related to God.

Leonardo da Vinci

MY river runs to thee: Blue sea, wilt welcome me? My river waits reply. Oh sea, look graciously! I 'll fetch thee brooks From spotted nooks,— Say, sea, Take me!

Emily Dickinson

Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm from an anointed king;
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord.

William Shakespeare

Without any coherent national organisation to repel from the land on which they had settled the ever-unknowable descents from the seas, the Saxons, now for four centuries entitled to be deemed the owners of the soil, very nearly succumbed completely to the Danish inroads. That they did not was due—as almost every critical turn of historic fortune has been due—to the sudden apparition in an era of confusion and decay of one of the great figures of history.

Winston Churchill

I have observed, on board a steamer, how men and women easily give way to their instinct for flirtation, because water has the power of washing away our sense of responsibility, and those who on land resemble the oak in their firmness behave like floating seaweed when on the sea.

Rabindranath Tagore

The time and my intents are savage-wild,
More fierce and more inexorable far
Than empty tigers or the roaring sea.

William Shakespeare

We are too feeble and sluggish to make our way out to the upper limit of the air. If someone could reach the summit, or put on wings and fly aloft, when he put up his head he would see the world above, just as fishes see our world when they put up their heads out of the sea; and if his nature were able to bear the sight, he would recognize that that is the true heaven...

Why are the bones of great fishes, and oysters and corals and various other shells and sea-snails, found on the high tops of mountains that border the sea, in the same way in which they are found in the depths of the sea?

Leonardo da Vinci

I sit between my brother the mountain and my sister the sea. We three are one in loneliness, and the love that binds us together is deep and strong and strange.

A ruddy drop of manly blood
The surging sea outweighs;
The world uncertain comes and goes,
The lover rooted stays.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Always the same. Now a spark of hope flashes up, then a sea of despair rages, and always pain; always pain, always despair, and always the same.