Top 100 Great Sea Sayings
#1. Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn
John Berryman
#2. I am convinced that America's great sea of goodwill can be, in fact, a rising tide, a tide that could lift every veteran and every family of our wounded and fallen.
Michael Mullen
#3. 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
#4. When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea's voice to the men on shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters.
Stephen Crane
#5. I never was on the dull, tame shore, But I loved the great sea more and more.
Bryan Procter
#6. Time is a kind of river, an irresistible flood sweeping up men and events and carrying them headlong, one after the other, to the great sea of being.
Marcus Aurelius
#7. Dear Prince, I must leave you, but I will never forget you, and next spring I will bring you back two beautiful jewels in place of those you have given away. The ruby shall be redder than a red rose, and the sapphire shall be as blue as the great sea.
Oscar Wilde
#8. Life is the wave's deep whisper on the shore Of a great sea beyond.
Henry Abbey
#9. and thrust into the great sea of wheat, yellow, wavy, and murmurous, full of quiet motion and small whisperings. Here he often loved to wander, through the forest of stiff strong stalks that carried their own golden sky away over his head - a
Kenneth Grahame
#10. Books," says E. P. Whipple, "are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time." "As a rule," said Benjamin Disraeli, "the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information.
Orison Swett Marden
#11. Sell a country?! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Did not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?
Tecumseh
#12. Pleasant it is, when over a great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from shore upon another's great tribulation; not because any man's troubles are a delectable joy, but because to perceive you are free of them yourself is pleasant.
Lucretius
#13. It is pleasurable, when winds disturb the waves of a great sea, to gaze out from land upon the great trials of another.
Lucretius
#14. Into the bosom of the one great sea Flow streams that come from the hills on every side, Their names are various as their springs And thus in every land do men bow down To one great God, though known by many names.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
#15. How wise and how merciful is that provision of nature by which his earthly anchor is usually loosened by many little imperceptible tugs, until his consciousness has drifted out of its untenable earthly harbor into the great sea beyond!
Arthur Conan Doyle
#16. Our Lady showed us a great sea of fire which seemed to be under the earth. - Sister Lucia Dos Santos
Peter J. Tanous
#17. A great sea fog is not homogenous
its density varies: it is honeycombed with streets, it has its caves of clear air, its cliffs of solid vapour, all shifting and changing place with the subtlety of legerdemain.
Henry De Vere Stacpoole
#18. Great sea captains are made in rough waters and deep seas.
Kathryn Kuhlman
#19. And, suddenly, it came home to me that I was a little man in a little ship, in the midst of a very great sea.
William Hope Hodgson
#20. I was fortunate to sell at a time of great sea change in the romance genre; suddenly heroines were allowed to be portrayed as having rich, fulfilling lives. They didn't need a man for security or self-esteem, but having that one very special man in their lives proved the icing on the cake.
JoAnn Ross
#21. This was the story of our lives: minor insurrections, tiny victories, a brief chance to ridicule our oppressors, little floating vessels of hope amid a great sea of uncertainty, deprivation and fear.
Jojo Moyes
#22. I am but one more drop in the great sea of matter, defined, with the ability to realize my existence.
Sylvia Plath
#23. You are like Odysseus, who could go out onto the great sea, lose all his goods and his friends, come to the boundaries of death, and return still himself.
Gillian Bradshaw
#25. As children we listened to the sound of the sea still echoing in the shell we picked up by the shore. That ancestral roar links us to the great sea which surges within us as well.
James Hollis
#26. In battle, in forest, at the precipice in the mountains,
On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,
In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,
The good deeds a man has done before defend him.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
#27. When Israel was from bondage led,Led by the Almighty's handFrom out of foreign land,The great sea beheld and fled.
Abraham Cowley
#28. Drown'd, all drown'd,
In that great sea which nothing disembogues.
Mary Hays
#29. Students of the Way must not study Buddhism for the sake of themselves. They must study Buddhism only for the sake of Buddhism. The key to this is to renounce both body and mind without holding anything back and to offer them to the great sea of Buddhism.
Dogen
#30. Old age: The estuary that enlarges and spreads itself grandly as it pours into the Great Sea.
Walt Whitman
#31. It is said that he was the first of Men to reach the Great Sea, and that none, save the Eldar, have ever felt more deeply the longing that it brings.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#32. So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.
Seamus Heaney
#33. You are now
In London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow
At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore
Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more.
Yet in its depth what treasures!
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#34. All Being within this order, by the laws
of its own nature is impelled to find
its proper station round its Primal Cause.
Thus every nature moves across the tide
of the great sea of being to its own port,
each with its given instinct as its guide.
Dante Alighieri
#36. Wealth and dominion fade into the mass
Of the great sea of human right and wrong,
When once from our possession they must pass;
But love, though misdirected, is among
The things which are immortal, and surpass
All that frail stuff which will be - or which was.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#37. I had come to appreciate the long open stretches of two-lane highway across the sagey sea and mountain-studded plateau of the Great Basin, but the towns and cities were another thing. I liked the natural face of Nevada, but was not as impressed by the human face.
Neil Peart
#38. Mary Fisher lives in a High Tower, on the edge of the sea: she writes a great deal about the nature of love. She tells lies.
Faye Weldon
#39. There was an indefinable something that spoke of the sea in the not-too-great distance.
Stephen King
#40. Aviation will give new nourishment to the religious sprit of mankind. It will add airspace to those other great heighteners of the cosmic mood: the wood, the sea, the desert.
Christian Morgenstern
#41. Rejoice, Florence, seeing you are so great that over sea and land you flap your wings, and your name is widely known in Hell!
Dante Alighieri
#42. I wanted to be an artist. I was studying art. I wanted to be a great painter. When I went into the Navy, there wasn't much to draw at sea. So I began writing, and I began reading a lot.
Evan Hunter
#43. There's nothing in the sea this fish would fear. Other fish run from bigger things. That's their instinct. But this fish doesn't run from anything. He doesn't fear.
Peter Benchley
#44. A great tragedy passes from crest to hollow of passion, rises and sinks again, as rhythmically as sea-waves.
Austin O'Malley
#45. Men saw the stars at the edge of the sea They thought great thoughts about liberty Poets wrote down words that did fit Writers wrote books Thinkers thought about it.
Van Morrison
#46. God's mercy is so great that you may sooner drain the sea of its water, or deprive the sun of its light, or make space too narrow, than diminish the great mercy of God.
Charles Spurgeon
#47. Whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the sea great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies. And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-tender young and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of the beginning and the end.
D.H. Lawrence
#48. We look at mountains and call them eternal, and they seem ... but in the course of time, mountains rise and fall, rivers change their courses, starts fall from the sky, and great cities sink beneath the sea. Even gods die, we think. Everything changes.
George R R Martin
#49. Bruges was his dead wife. And his dead wife was Bruges. The two were untied in a like destiny. It was Bruges-la-Morte, the dead town entombed in its stone quais, with the arteries of its canals cold once the great pulse of the sea had ceased beating in them.
Georges Rodenbach
#50. It is enough for me by day To walk the same bright earth with him; Enough that over us by night The same great roof of stars is dim. I do not hope to bind the wind Or set a fetter on the sea
It is enough to feel his love Blow by like music over me.
Sara Teasdale
#51. On the long dusty ribbon of the long city street,
The pageant of life is passing me on multitudinous feet,
With a word here of the hills, and a song there of the sea
And-the great movement changes-the pageant passes me.
John Masefield
#52. My wife and I just prefer Seattle. It's a beautiful city. Great setting. You open your front door in the morning and the air smells like pine and the sea, as opposed to bus exhaust.
Ron Reagan
#53. Unfortunately, half the boats were lost in a great storm at sea, and many members of the six boats that did make it to their destinations safely, were later killed by the very native people to whom they sought to transmit their knowledge of the Atlantean sciences, arts and metaphysics.
Frederick Lenz
#54. Come watch with me the shaft of fire that glows in yonder West; the fair, frail palaces, The fading Alps and archipelagoes and great cloud continents of sunset-seas.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#55. The army of the sea shall stand before the city, then shall go away for a passage that shall not be very long, as a great prey of citizens shall be holding the ground. The fleet returns. The great emblem recovered.
Nostradamus
#56. The old gods have the beauty and goodness of the sun, the sea, the wind, the mountains, great wild animals; splendid, powerful, and dangerous realities that do not come within the sphere of human morality, and are in no way concerned about the human race.
A.H. Armstrong
#57. Time is more complex near the sea than in any other place, for in addition to the circling of the sun and the turning of the seasons, the waves beat out the passage of time on the rocks and the tides rise and fall as a great clepsydra.
John Steinbeck
#58. He heard the sound of waves striking the shore, and it was as though the surging of his young blood was keeping time with the movement of the sea's great tides. It was doubtless because nature itself satisfied his need that Shinji felt no particular lack of music in his everyday life.
Yukio Mishima
#59. The sea has been called deceitful and treacherous, but there lies in this trait only the character of a great natural power, which, to speak according to our own feelings, renews its strength, and, without reference to joy or sorrow, follows eternal laws which are imposed by a higher Power.
Wilhelm Von Humboldt
#60. Over our manhood bend the skies; Against our fallen and traitor lives The great winds utter prophecies; With our faint hearts the mountain strives, Its arms outstretched, the druid wood Waits with its benedicite And to our age's drowsy blood Still shouts the inspiring sea.
James Russell Lowell
#61. Can the water in the valleys ever stop and rest?
When the water finally reaches the sea, it becomes great waves.
Francis Harold Cook
#62. Truth doesn't run on time like a commuter train, though time may run on truth. And the Scenes Gone By and the Scenes to Come flow blending together in the sea-green deep while Now spreads in circles on the surface.
Ken Kesey
#63. He arose and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, "Peace, be still!" And the wind ceased and there was a great calm. MARK 4:39
David Jeremiah
#64. I suppose because I grew up a thousand miles from the sea and missed the great age of passenger liners, I have always been subject to a romantic longing for ocean travel.
Bill Bryson
#65. Verily, a polluted stream is man. One must actually be a sea to take in a polluted stream without becoming impure. Behold, I teach you the superman: he is the this sea, in him can your great contempt go under.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#66. The interior of Mexico consists of a mass of volcanic rocks, thrust up to a great height above the sea-level.
Edward Burnett Tylor
#67. I am the monarch of the sea, The Ruler of the Queen's Navee, Whose praise Great Britain loudly chants And we are his sisters, and his cousins, and his aunts!
Walter Raleigh
#68. Fishes live in the sea, as men do on land: the great ones eat up the little ones.
Pericles
#69. And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had bred.
Herman Melville
#70. When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everthing in me that is bewildered and confused.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#71. With this idea, being a man with long experience of the sea (and they certainly have a great advantage over other men in any sort of task) ...
Garcilaso De La Vega
#72. From the sea of effortlessness, let your great uncaused compassion shine forth.
Hakuin Ekaku
#73. In truth, man is a polluted river. One must be a sea to receive a polluted river without becoming defiled. I bring you the Superman! He is that sea; in him your great contempt can be submerged.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#74. Surely a man needs a closed place wherein he may strike root and, like the seed, become. But also he needs the great Milky Way above him and the vast sea spaces, though neither stars nor ocean serve his daily needs.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
#75. When the king asked him what he meant by infesting the sea, the pirate defiantly replied:
The same as you do when you infest the whole world;
but because I do it with a little ship I am called a robber,
and because you do it with a great fleet, you are an emperor.
Saint Augustine
#76. There is an enormous amount to be learned about the sea; like most wildernesses, it has great potential.
Sylvia Earle
#77. Let all men know how empty and powerless is the power of kings. For there is none worthy of the name but God, whom heaven, earth and sea obey
Cnut The Great
#78. First in France, first in Romania - by land and sea to the English and Paris. Marvellous deeds by that great alliance. The violent brute will lose Lorraine.
Nostradamus
#79. The sea, like a crinkled chart, spread to the horizon, and lapped the sharp outline of the coast, while the houses were white shells in a rounded grotto, pricked here and there by a great orange sun.
Daphne Du Maurier
#81. The mariner will have dominion over the atmosphere and the great deep, over the fish of the sea and the fowls of the air.
Mary Baker Eddy
#82. Fishing is such great fun, I have often felt, that it really ought to be done in bed
John D. Voelker
#83. As i emerge on deck the ordered arrangement of the stars meets my eye, unclouded, infinitely wearisome. There they are: stars, sun, sea, light, darkness, space, great waters; the formidable Work of the Seven Days, into which mankind seems to have blundered unbidden. Or else decoyed.
Joseph Conrad
#84. Why could you not have left me as I was, in the sea of being?"
"Because the world has need of your humility, your piety, your great teaching and your Machiavellian scheming.
Roger Zelazny
#85. As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.
Willa Cather
#86. Fishing in rainy conditions may make fisherman seem crazy to the great mass of unimaginative people, but then few fishermen care what they think
John Gierach
#87. Lillian's recurrent dream of a ship that could not reach the water, that sailed laboriously, pushed by her with great effort, through city streets, had determined her course toward the sea, as if she would give this ship, once and for all, its proper sea bed.
Anais Nin
#88. I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, or on the ocean - wherever my imagination ranges.
Anton Chekhov
#89. It is never too late to go quietly to our lakes, rivers, oceans, even our small streams, and say to the sea gulls, the great blue herons, the bald eagles, the salmon, that we are sorry.
Brenda Peterson
#90. The Oceanic White Tip is considered one of the most dangerous sharks in the sea along with the Great White and Tiger. It is responsible for some of the most famous episodes of man-eating in history, such as when the U.S.S. Indianapolis sank in 1945.
Brian Skerry
#91. Sea-foam
And coral! Oh, I'll
Climb the great pasture rocks
And dream me mermaid in the sun's
Gold flood.
Adelaide Crapsey
#92. My soul is full of longing for the secret of the sea, and the heart of the great ocean sends a thrilling pulse through me.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#93. He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ringed with the azure world, he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.
Alfred The Great
#94. This is the land of Narnia,' said the Faun, 'where we are now; all that lies between the lamp-post and the great castle of Cair Paravel on the eastern sea.
C.S. Lewis
#95. The fate of this man or that man was less than a drop, although it was a sparkling one, in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea.
T.H. White
#96. If you have decided to sail to the sea with great courage and determination, even the storm on the horizon will step aside!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#97. After the conquest of the South Pole by Amundsen who, by a narrow margin of days only, was in advance of the British Expedition under Scott, there remained but one great main object of Antarctic journeying - the crossing of the South Polar continent from sea to sea
Ernest Shackleton
#98. The Okavango Delta is an astonishing sight: the great Okavango River, rather than flow towards the sea, flows inland, into the sands of the Kalahari.
Alexander McCall Smith
#99. In terms of me being a Christian, going to Israel was really cool. Going to the West Bank, Bethlehem, floating in the Dead Sea - that was great for me.
Larry Fitzgerald
#100. God! ... Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks! I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look.
James Joyce
