“The seas are the heart's blood of the earth.”
-- Henry Beston, The Headlong Wave in The Outermost House, 1928
“What fairy-like music steals over the sea,
Entrancing our senses with charmed melody?”
-- Mrs. C. B. Wilson, What Fairy-like Music.
“A life on the ocean wave!
A home on the rolling deep,
Where the scattered waters rave,
And the winds their revels keep!”
-- Epes Sargent, Life on the Ocean Wave
“The sea, washing the equator and the poles, offers its perilous aid, and the power and empire that follow it. . . . ‘Beware of me,’ it says, ‘but if you can hold me, I am the key to all the lands.’”
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life, Wealth, 1860
“What are the wild waves saying,
Sister, the whole day long,
That ever amid our playing
I hear but their low, lone song?”
-- Joseph E. Carpenter, What are the Wild Waves Saying?
“To me, the sea is like a person - like a child that I've known a long time. It sounds crazy, I know, but when I swim in the sea I talk to it. I never feel alone when I'm out there.”
-- Gertrude Ederle, Remarks, New York Post, 5 Sept. 1956
“For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
It's always ourself we find in the sea.”
-- E. E. Cummings, maggie and millie and mollie and may in 95 Poems, 1958.
“The Mediterranean has the color of mackerel, changeable I mean. You don't always know if it is green or violet, you can't even say it's blue, because the next moment the changing reflection has taken on a tint of rose or gray.”
-- Vincent Van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, 1927
“I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it roaring and raging like a wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free, and ending just where it began.”
-- William Hazlitt, Common Places, Literary Examiner, 8 November 1823
“The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.”
-- Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea, 1906
“For all at last return to the sea - to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end.”
-- Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us, 1950
“Come o'er the moonlit sea,
The waves are brightly glowing.”
-- Charles Jefferys
“Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part.”
-- Hermann Broch, The Spell, 1976
“The sea! the sea! the open sea!
The blue, the fresh, the ever free!”
-- Bryan W. Procter
“We are as near to heaven by sea as by land.”
-- Sir Humphrey Gilbert, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffics and Discoveries of the English Nation by Richard Hakluyt, 1600
“I 'm on the sea! I 'm on the sea!
I am where I would ever be,
With the blue above and the blue below,
And silence wheresoe'er I go.”
-- Bryan W. Procter
“I never was on the dull, tame shore,
But I loved the great sea more and more.”
-- Bryan W. Procter
“There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.”
-- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, 1900