Top 100 Shipwreck Quotes
#1. Voyaging begins when one burns one's boats, adventures begin with a shipwreck.
Michel Serres
#2. Well, father, in the shipwreck of life, for life is an eternal shipwreck of our hopes, I cast into the sea my useless encumbrance, that is all, and I remain with my own will, disposed to live perfectly alone, and, consequently, perfectly free. (Eugenie to her father)
Alexandre Dumas
#4. Tired of life, afraid of death, not unlike
A lost brig, toy of ebb and flow on the ocean,
My soul weighs anchor for a frightful shipwreck.
Paul Verlaine
#5. Shipwreck? Snow Job? I know. Firefly. I sort of feel a connection to him. Can't explain it.
Richard Castle
#6. Love is the occupation of the idle man, the amusement of a busy one, and the shipwreck of a sovereign.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#7. Any government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck.
[On Water]
Guy De Maupassant
#8. The man who has experienced shipwreck shudders even at a calm sea.
Ovid
#9. Dreaming of another time,
Dreaming of clasping your hands so tight,
Dreaming of another time,
Dreaming of the shipwreck that is in my heart would end
Tanzy Sayadi
#10. Was that hard-hearted? Well, so what if it was. She'd been through enough to harden anyone. It was none of her choosing; all she'd done was clung on to her life like a spar from a shipwreck. Better to be hardened than crushed to nothing.
Emma Donoghue
#11. The channel is known only to the natives; so that if any stranger should enter into the bay without one of their pilots he would run great danger of shipwreck.
Thomas More
#12. When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution ... Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.
Paul Virilio
#14. He wrongly accuses Neptune, who makes shipwreck a second time.
Publilius Syrus
#16. I have pondered on the causes of a life's shipwreck. I think that our lives are worse than the mind's quality would warrant. There are many who know virtue. We know the good, we apprehend it clearly. But we can't bring it to achievement.
Euripides
#17. But it ain't our feelings we have to steer by through life
no, no, we'd make shipwreck mighty often if we did that. There's only the one safe compass and we've got to set our course by that
what it's right to do.
L.M. Montgomery
#18. Like a shipwreck or a jetty, almost anything that forms a structure in the ocean, whether it is natural or artificial over time, collects life.
Sylvia Earle
#20. The Stalker by Gail Anderson-Dargatz In From the Cold by Deborah Ellis Shipwreck by Maureen Jennings The Picture of Nobody by Rabindranath Maharaj The Hangman by Louise Penny Easy Money by Gail Vaz-Oxlade 2011
Louise Penny
#21. In the shipwreck of life - for life is an eternal shipwreck of our hopes
Alexandre Dumas
#22. In a forest of stars and boughs, here is your face. In the garden, in the shipwreck, in sacred stones, in figs and roses. Through long nights of walking, what does not sing for us?
Anne Michaels
#23. None of us is immune to shipwreck. Come, beckons the fatal shore: come and die on my white sands, it said. And we do.
Alexander McCall Smith
#24. I always thought a shipwreck was a well-organized affair, but I've learned the devil a lot in the last five minutes.
Erik Larson
#25. 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
#26. Her virtues, graced with external gifts, Do breed love's settled passions in my heart; And like as rigour of tempestuous gusts Provokes the mightiest hulk against the tide, So am I driven by breath of her renown Either to suffer shipwreck or arrive Where I may have fruition of her love.
William Shakespeare
#27. There are more consequences to a shipwreck than the underwriters notice.
Henry David Thoreau
#28. In our civilization there are fearful hours - such are those when the criminal law pronounces shipwreck upon a man. What a mournful moment is that in which society withdraws itself and gives up a thinking being forever.
Victor Hugo
#29. The invention of the ship is also the invention of the shipwreck,
Jenny Offill
#30. Where [God] is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution are not the absolutely final things.
William James
#31. The only sea I saw Was the seesaw sea With you riding on it. Lie down, lie easy. Let me shipwreck in your thighs.
Dylan Thomas
#32. In the name of God, Monsieur, let us have greater confidence in Him than we do; let us allow Him to steer our little bark; if it is useful and pleasing to Him, He will save it from shipwreck.
Vincent De Paul
#33. When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.
Willa Cather
#34. Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck.
Guy De Maupassant
#35. You're you,' he repeats, his eyes full of grief. 'You're the same girl who crashed on this planet with me, who I dragged through forests and over mountains, who climbed through a shipwreck full of bodies to save my life. You're the same girl I loved, and I love you now.
Amie Kaufman
#36. Don't let us rejoice in punishment, even when the hand of God alone inflicts it. The best of us are but poor wretches, just saved from shipwreck. Can we feel anything but awe and pity when we see a fellow-passenger swallowed by the waves?
George Eliot
#37. Well, my dear father, in the shipwreck of life
for life is an eternal shipwreck of our hopes
I throw all my useless baggage in the sea, that's all, and remain with my will, prepared to live entirely alone and consequently entirely free.
Alexandre Dumas
#38. Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.
Voltaire
#39. So much is lost, he said, in the shipwreck. What remains are fragments, and if you don't hold on to them the sea will take them too.
Rachel Cusk
#40. The most progressive minister must shipwreck if he has a block of reactionary bureaucrats against him. And in Germany the bureaucrats all have their jobs still. - These pen-pushing Napoleons are invincible.
Erich Maria Remarque
#41. Personally, I don't think that having a water goddess for an ancestress is a guarantee of freedom against seasickness, nor come to that, shipwreck.
Philippa Gregory
#42. Her hands clung to my neck; they would not have held me so fast in a shipwreck. And I did not understand whether she wanted me to save her or to drown with her.
Raymond Radiguet
#43. If you can realistically render
a cypress tree, would you include one when commissioned to paint
a sailor in the midst of a shipwreck?
Horace
#44. Laws are not made like lime-twigs or nets, to catch everything that toucheth them; but rather like sea-marks, to guide from shipwreck the ignorant passenger.
Philip Sidney
#45. If we once get above our Bibles and cease making the written Word of God our sole rule both as to faith and practice, we shall soon lie open to all manner of delusion and be in great danger of making shipwreck of faith and a good conscience.
George Whitefield
#46. But there really was no point in asking. She read things, she knew things, and out they came, little surprises. It was strangely like unwrapping little gifts, not all of which he appreciated. She clung to facts and information, like flotsam in a shipwreck. They'd saved her.
Julie Anne Long
#47. [ ... ] the heart moving through a tunnel,
in it darkness, darkness, darkness,
like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves,
as though we were drowning inside our hearts,
as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.
Pablo Neruda
#48. Accordingly, death is a harbor of peace for the just, but is believed a shipwreck for the wicked.
Ambrose
#49. Nina glanced from Inej to Kaz and saw they both wore the same expression. Nina knew that look. It came after the shipwreck, when the tide moved against you and the sky had gone dark. It was the first sight of land, the hope of shelter and even salvation that might await you on a distant shore.
Leigh Bardugo
#50. We poison our lives with fear of burglary and shipwreck, and, ask anyone, the house is never burgled, and the ship never goes down.
Jean Anouilh
#51. When I die, it will be a shipwreck, and as when a huge ship sinks, many people all around will be sucked down with it.
Pablo Picasso
#52. If one tries to navigate unknown waters one runs the risk of shipwreck
Albert Einstein
#53. I didn't lead a very wise life, myself, but it was a full one and a grown-up one. You come of age very quickly through shipwreck and disaster.
Philip Dunne
#54. Her heart begins to sing to me, the Siren's song that's calling me to shipwreck. I go to it willingly. When her lips meet mine, I know I'm lost, I'm found - I'm home.
Amy A. Bartol
#55. Shipwreck in youth is sorrowful enough, but one looks for storms at the spring equinox. Yet it is the September equinox that drowns.
Helen Waddell
#57. What if others suffer shipwreck, yet none that sail with Jesus have ever been stranded yet.
Charles Spurgeon
#58. There was a house at the foot of the tower, close to the thunder of the waves breaking against the cliffs, where love was more intense because it seemed like a shipwreck.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#59. Only that which cannot be lost in a shipwreck is yours.
Al-Ghazali
#60. Often it's just a short swim from the shipwreck of your life to the island paradise of your dreams, assuming you don't drown in the metaphor.
Robert Breault
#61. To name her is to sink her," he told me. "That which we name takes greater weight than the sea it displaces. Ask any shipwreck.
Neal Shusterman
#62. The romantic chivalric tradition takes, or at any rate has in the past taken, the young man's eye off women as they are, as companions in shipwreck not guiding stars.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#63. I'm very resourceful. I'd be good in prison. I'd be good in a shipwreck. I'd make a great hostage.
David Letterman
#64. All legitimate government is a mutual insurance company, voluntarily agreed upon by the parties to it, for the protection of their rights against wrong-doers. In its voluntary character it is precisely similar to an association for mutual protection against fire or shipwreck.
Lysander Spooner
#65. In a very real sense, we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet, even in a shipwreck, human decencies and human values do not necessarily vanish, and we must make the most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a manner to which we may look forward as worthy of our dignity.
Norbert Wiener
#66. The Westerly Wind asserting his sway from the south-west quarter is often like a monarch gone mad, driving forth with wild imprecations the most faithful of his courtiers to shipwreck, disaster, and death.
Joseph Conrad
#67. By the time she was fifteen, the age she was the day of the shipwreck, opinions by the dozen landed in each hollow track left by her feet.
Jodi Lynn Anderson
#68. Lovers of literature will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism.
Josef Skvorecky
#69. With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#70. The best way to meet a woman is in an emergency situation - if you're in a shipwreck, or you find yourself behind enemy lines, or in a flood.
Mark Helprin
#71. The author points out strikingly different reactions to calamity. While many passengers of a devastating shipwreck were thankful to be alive, future presidential assassin Charles Guiteau saw his being spared as proof of his exceptionalism rather than of the grace from which he benefited.
Candice Millard
#72. For mankind you've made your wintry bed.
A shipwreck of your own mortality
Marie Symeou
#73. The cross means there is no shipwreck without hope; there is no dark without dawn; nor storm without haven.
Pope John Paul II
#74. Some places speak distinctly. Certain dark gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#75. THRILLING NARRATIVES OF MUTINY, MURDER AND PIRACY, A WEIRD SERIES OF Tales of Shipwreck and Disaster, FROM THE EARLIEST PART OF THE CENTURY TO THE PRESENT TIME, WITH ACCOUNTS OF Providential Escapes AND HEART-RENDING FATALITIES.
Anonymous
#76. Reserve some hours daily to examine yourself and fortune; for if you embark yourself in perpetual conversation or recreation, you will certainly shipwreck your mind and fortune.
Anne Of Austria
#77. There's nothing like a shipwreck to spark the imagination of everyone who was not on that specific ship.
Jon Stewart
#78. Today, there is a whole generation of Christian men who are laughing at things that ought to make them weep, and not a few of them will suffer shipwreck, and some-the loss of their souls. Let the indiscriminate viewer beware.
R. Kent Hughes
#79. The Church had the words reason and liberty on her lips when the inalienable rights of the human race were threatened with shipwreck.
Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
#80. When Zeno received news of a shipwreck and heard that all his luggage had been sunk he said, Fortune bids me to be a less encumbered philosopher.
Seneca.
#81. There is a persistent funny form of suspicion in most of us that we can solve our own problems and be the masters of our own ships of life, but the fact of the matter is that by ourselves we can only be consumed by our problems and suffer the shipwreck.
Harry Stack Sullivan
#82. Life often seems like a long shipwreck of which the debris are friendship, glory, and love. - The shores of existence are strewn with them.
Madame De Stael
#83. He blames Neptune unjustly who twice suffers shipwreck.
Publilius Syrus
#85. When I see a shipwreck, I like to know what caused the disaster ... I learned nothing but the glow that wrapped her face when the soup came. That's the story.
O. Henry
#86. We'll go." Her voice is surprisingly deep and forceful. Set in her sunken, shipwreck face, her eyes burn like two smoldering coals. "We'll fight.
Lauren Oliver
#87. But here, two thousand miles from home, there was a real shipwreck, a real hope. A choice big enough to change our lives forever.
Gordon Korman
#88. All I'd ever wanted was to forget. but even when I thought I had, pieces had kept emerging, like bits of wood floating up to the surface that only hint at the shipwreck below.
Sarah Dessen
#89. Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.
Francis Bacon
#90. I'd always felt like I was going to take part in adventures in my life. That's what led me to diving in the shipwreck to begin with. But when you're faced with your own demise, you have to accept that you are vulnerable and that you are only here for a set period of time.
Phil Keoghan
#92. An old man said, We are not condemned because of our thoughts that enter us, but because we use our thoughts badly; our thoughts can cause us either to suffer shipwreck or to be crowned.
Poemen
#93. There is so much inherent drama in the matter of change. Disappointment in yourself and others, coping with the fact that life is essentially shipwreck, becoming a person you yourself could not imagine yourself to be, for good and for bad, and then ultimately there is the basic matter of loss.
Jane Hamilton
#94. The sceptic, when he plunges into the depths of infidelity, like the miser who leaps from the shipwreck, will find that the treasures which he bears about him will only sink him deeper in the abyss.
Charles Caleb Colton
#95. He who has suffered shipwreck, fears to sail Upon the seas, though with a gentle gale.
Robert Herrick
#96. Art is like a shipwreck; it's every man for himself.
Marcel Duchamp
#97. Jane Austen can in fact get more drama out of morality than most other writers can get from shipwreck, battle, murder, or mayhem.
Ronald Blythe
#98. There is also a fable told by Phaedrus, about how Simonides was once a victim of shipwreck. As the other passengers scurried about the sinking ship trying to save their possessions, the poet stood idle. When questioned, he declared, mecum mea sunt cuncta: everything that is me is with me.
Anne Carson
#99. So exquisitely perfect was the darkness of the heavens above that one would have difficulty believing it was a prison to the passengers and crew of The Black Witch.
Micheal Rivers
#100. The injured captain, lying in the bow, was at this time buried in that profound dejection and indifference which comes, temporarily at least, to
even the bravest and most enduring when, willy nilly, the firm fails, the army loses, the ship goes down.
Stephen Crane
