Sea Voyage Quotes

But a wide sea voyage severs us at once. It makes us conscious of being cast loose from the secure anchorage of settled life, and sent adrift upon a doubtful world. It interposes a gulf, not merely imaginary, but real, between us and our homes
a gulf, subject to tempest, and fear, and uncertainty, rendering distance palpable, and return precarious. ~ Washington Irving

This is life.
Learning to love through loss. Seeking warm pockets in the bitter cold. Finding the worth of a smile on a cloudy day. Carrying the weight of the world on weary shoulders - mistakes, sins, injustices - added upon daily. Enduring burdens that spur greater strength.
This is life.
Sorting through layers of expressions staring you straight in the eye. A battle to be right when wrong, to be good when bad, to be content when in need, and to laugh when tearing up.
This is life.
Valuing things of no worth. Reevaluating dreams. Laboring ceaselessly against the current. Seeing less, wanting more, having enough.
This is life.
Chasing the moon when the sun would extend its warmth. Slapping the hand that would offer a gentle caress. Cowering at personal, monstrous shadows. Giving and taking in unbalanced weights. Diminishing the majesty of mountains in order to form our own lowly hills. Hoping for more than we deserve.
This is life.
Hurting. Despairing. Losing. Weeping. Suffering. Laboring. Sinking. Mourning. Appreciating with greater capacity and sincerity a learned knowledge that these adversities do have their opposites.
This is life.
A taste. A revelation. A banishment. A mercy. A test. An experience. A turbulent sea-voyage that shall assuredly reach the unseen shore, making seasoned sailors of us all.
This is life. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

... I noticed a woman whose face was a sea voyage I had not the courage to attempt. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Have you ever heard of the madman who on a bright morning lighted a lantern and ran to the market-place calling out unceasingly: "I seek God! I seek God!" - As there were many people standing about who did not believe in God, he caused a great deal of amusement. Why! is he lost? said one. Has he strayed away like a child? said another. Or does he keep himself hidden? Is he afraid of us? Has he taken a sea-voyage? Has he emigrated? - the people cried out laughingly, all in a hubbub. The insane man jumped into their midst and transfixed them with his glances. "Where is God gone?" he called out. "I mean to tell you! We have killed him, - you and I! We are all his murderers! But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Back-wards, sideways, forewards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? Shall we not have to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? - for even Gods putrefy! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous o ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The world we made together is gone now. Silk and cinnamon do not bring it back to me as clearly as the smell of potatoes frying with onions, or the purr of a cat, or the feel of a knot beneath my fingers. And that in itself is proof of how the voyage changed me, who set out only wanting to see anything new and different. ~ Susan Palwick

Sometimes, on days when the weather was beyond redemption, mere residence in the house, situated in the midst of a steady and continuous rain, had all the gliding ease, the soothing silence, the interest of a sea voyage; another time, on a bright day, to lie still in bed was to let the lights and shadows play around me as round a tree trunk. ~ Marcel Proust

In the shortest sea voyage there is no sense of time. You have been down in the cabin for hours or days or years. Nobody knows or cares. You know all the people to the point of indifference. You do not believe in dry land any more - you are caught in the pendulum itself, and left there, idly swinging. ~ Katherine Mansfield

There is a splendid story that, during the long sea voyage, Cowdrey was observed by Frank Tyson being addressed with some passion by a well-dressed man whom Tyson didn't recognize: 'When you reach Australia, just remember one thing,' exclaimed the older gentleman, 'Hate the bastards!' Tyson enquired of scorer and baggage man George Duckworth as to the man's identity: 'That," confided the 'bodyline' veteran, 'was Douglas Jardine. ~ Dave Wilson

Curiosity is only vanity. Most frequently we wish not to know, but to talk. We would not take a sea voyage for the sole pleasure of seeing without hope of ever telling. ~ Blaise Pascal

During the long sea voyage from Manila to San Francisco, doctors discovered that Taft's incision was not healing properly. It was "opened and drained," but months of bed rest the previous fall had weakened his knees and ankles, making it painful for him to stand for any protracted time. To compound matters, Nellie was suffering from what was later diagnosed as malaria. ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

The Mayflower sped across the white-tipped waves once the voyage was under way, and the passengers were quickly afflicted with seasickness. The crew took great delight in the sufferings of the landlubbers and tormented them mercilessly. "There is an insolent and very profane young man, Bradford wrote, "who was always harrassing the poor people in their sickness, and cursing them daily with greivous execrations." He even laughed that he hoped to 'throw half of them overboard before they came to their journey's end.'
The Puritans believe a just God punished the young sailor for his cruelty when, halfway through the voyage, 'it pleased God ... to smite the young man with a greivous disease, of which he died in a desperate manner." He was the first to be thrown overboard. ~ Tony Williams

On any sea voyage, even one as mundane as a cross-channel car ferry, it is difficult to focus on your destination until you have lost sight of the land. ~ Cathy Dobson

We have found that morals are not, like bacon, to be cured by hanging; nor, like wine, to be improved by sea voyages; nor, like honey, to be preserved in cells. ~ William Taylor

The Mars settlement may not grow that quickly, although the length of a sea voyage cross the Atlantic in the 1600's is comparable to the time it will take people to get to Mars on a spacecraft, and the cost, in relative terms, is not that different. ~ Stephen L. Petranek

As fire when thrown into water is cooled down and put out, so also a false accusation when brought against a man of the purest and holiest character, boils over and is at once dissipated, and vanishes and threats of heaven and sea, himself standing unmoved. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

The old man knew he was going far out and he left the smell of the land behind and rowed out into the clean early morning smell of the ocean. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

But, in the ocean of faces where every fierce and furious expression was in vivid life, there were two groups of faces - each seven in number - so fixedly contrasting with the rest, that never did sea roll which bore more memorable wrecks with it. Seven faces of prisoners, suddenly released by the storm that had burst their tomb, were carried high overhead: all scared, all lost, all wondering and amazed, as if the Last Day were come, and those who rejoiced around them were lost spirits. Other seven faces there were, carried higher, seven dead faces, whose drooping eyelids and half-seen eyes awaited the Last Day. Impassive faces, yet with a suspended - not an abolished - expression on them; faces, rather, in a fearful pause, as having yet to raise the dropped lids of the eyes, and bear witness with the bloodless lips, "THOU DIDST IT!" Seven ~ Charles Dickens

Nature, like a loving mother, is ever trying to keep land and sea, mountain and valley, each in its place, to hush the angry winds and waves, balance the extremes of heat and cold, of rain and drought, that peace, harmony and beauty may reign supreme. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The green sea swept into the shallows and seethed there like slaking quicklime. It surged over the rocks, tossing up spangles of water like a juggler and catching them deftly again behind. It raced knee-deep through the clefts and crevices, twisted and tortured in a thousand ways, till it swept nuzzling and sucking into the holes at the base of the cliff. The whole reef was a shambles of foam, but it was bright in the sun, bright as a shattered mirror, exuberant and leaping with light. ~ Colin Thiele

The Atlantic is a stormy moat, and the Mediterranean,
The blue pool in the old garden,
More than five thousand years has drunk sacrifice
Of ships and blood and shines in the sun; but here the Pacific:
The ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant.
Neither our present blood-feud with the brave dwarfs
Nor any future world-quarrel of westering
And eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, battle-falcons,
Are a mote of dust in the great scale-pan.
Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland plunging like
dolphins through the grey sea-smoke
Into pale sea, look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet: this
dome, this half-globe, this bulging
Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,
Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids that never close; this
is the staring unsleeping
Eye of the earth, and what it watches is not our wars. ~ Robinson Jeffers

I am Poseidon, EARTH SHAKER, RULER OF THE BOUNDLESS SEA, CREATOR OF STORMS, SWALLOWER OF SHIPS ~ George O'Connor

I no longer know If I wish to drown myself in love, vodka or the sea. ~ Franz Kafka

Hegel claimed that the 'world spirit' is developing toward an ever-expanding knowledge of itself. It's the same with rivers
they become broader and broader as they get nearer to the sea. According to Hegel, history is the story of the 'world spirit' gradually coming to consciousness of itself. Although the world has always existed, human culture and human development have made the world spirit increasingly conscious of its intrinsic value. ~ Jostein Gaarder

I would rather have bowel surgery in the woods with a stick. If you are not stung or pronged to death in some unexpected manner, you may be fatally chomped by sharks or crocodiles, or carried helplessly out to sea by irresistible currents, or left to stagger to an unhappy death in the baking outback. ~ Bill Bryson

I'm not
of this
world;
it pains me
deeply.
So, each night
just to survive,
I snip a piece of
mountain,
sea or sky
and fly. ~ Carolyn Riker

Light and unfeeling. Drifting and expanding through time and space. And then, as I know I am about to pierce the crust of existence, like a flying fish leaping out of the sea, I feel the pull from below. ~ Daniel Keyes

There's this fabulous innovation ship called Unreasonable at Sea, where I'm a mentor. One of the companies there was called Protei, and they're an open hardware ocean exploration and monitoring idea. ~ Megan Smith

We are all in the same boat, in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

We have reached the open sea, with some charts; and the firmament. ~ Dorothy Dunnett

Old English poetry is characterised by a number of poetic tropes which enable a writer to describe things indirectly and which require a reader imaginatively to construct their meaning. The most widespread of these figurative descriptions are what are known as kennings. Kennings often occur in compounds: for example, hronrad (whale-road) or swanrad (swan- road) meaning 'the sea'; banhus (bone-house) meaning the 'human body'. Some kennings involve borrowing or inventing words; others appear to be chosen to meet the alliterative requirement of a poetic line, and as a result some kennings are difficult to decode, leading to disputes in critical interpretation. But kennings do allow more abstract concepts to be communicated by using more familiar words: for example, God is often described as moncynnes weard ('guardian of mankind'). ~ Ronald Carter

Every voyage is self-awaken. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The evening darkens over
After a day so bright,
The windcapt waves discover
That wild will be the night. ~ Robert Bridges

A voice that to Dominica's fancy seemed to hold all the sunshine and the salt wind of fine days at sea smote her ears. ~ Georgette Heyer

Eternal Father, faithful friend, Be quick to answer those we send In brotherhood and urgent trust, On hidden missions dangerous, O hear us when we cry to Thee, For SEALs in air, on land, and sea. ~ Marcus Luttrell

Love, that is first and last of all things made,
The light that has the living world for shade,
The spirit that for temporal veil has on
The souls of all men woven in unison,
One fiery raiment with all lives inwrought
And lights of sunny and starry deed and thought,
And alway through new act and passion new
Shines the divine same body and beauty through,
The body spiritual of fire and light
That is to worldly noon as noon to night;
Love, that is flesh upon the spirit of man
And spirit within the flesh whence breath began;
Love, that keeps all the choir of lives in chime;
Love, that is blood within the veins of time;
That wrought the whole world without stroke of hand,
Shaping the breadth of sea, the length of land,
And with the pulse and motion of his breath
Through the great heart of the earth strikes life and death,
The sweet twain chords that make the sweet tune live
Through day and night of things alternative,
Through silence and through sound of stress and strife,
And ebb and flow of dying death and life:
Love, that sounds loud or light in all men's ears,
Whence all men's eyes take fire from sparks of tears,
That binds on all men's feet or chains or wings;
Love that is root and fruit of terrene things;
Love, that the whole world's waters shall not drown,
The whole world's fiery forces not burn down;
Love, that what time his own hands ~ Algernon Charles Swinburne

Voyager upon life's sea, To yourself be true, And whate'er your lot may be, Paddle your own canoe. ~ Sarah T. Bolton

I strode from the sea and could hardy stand, this enormous weight around my neck was pulling me down! I looked down at what it was; the damn container was full of seawater! I had been swimming with a gallon weight of seawater weighing me down, no wonder I found it difficult to stay afloat and swim forwards. I may as well have been swimming with a millstone around my neck! ~ Stephen Richards

I had not then learned the philosophy which teaches that he who would attempt enterprises of great command, must begin his government by laying its foundations in his own breast, in control of his own passions & that he who would survey the world must first sound the depth & shallows of his own character. ~ William Reynolds

Aboard at a ship's helm
A young steersman steering with care.

Through fog on a sea-coast dolefully ringing,
An ocean-bell - O a warning bell, rock'd by the waves.

O you give good notice indeed, you bell by the sea-reefs ringing,
Ringing, ringing, to warn the ship from its wreck-place.

For as on the alert O steersman, you mind the loud admonition,
The bows turn, the freighted ship tacking speeds away under her grey sails,
The beautiful and noble ship with all her precious wealth speeds away gaily and safe.

But O ship, the immortal ship! O ship aboard the ship! Ship of the body, ship of the soul, voyaging, voyaging, voyaging. ~ Walt Whitman

The strange thing arched its serpentine body to bring its head closer to the bear, all of its many eyes staring straight at him with alien curiosity. The thing looked at the bear. The bear looked at the thing.
"Oh well," said the bear. "Made a plan. Better stick to it, I suppose." And with that, mallet in paw, he leaped form the boat. ~ Dave Shelton

Of all the works by Victor Hugo the poetic generation of 1880 preferred above all the Chansons des Rues et des Bois ('Songs of the Streets and Woods') and the late poems such as Ce que dit Ia Bouche d'Ombre ('What says the mouth of shadow'), written during a period of intense spiritualism. Quite apart from drawings done during seances, for the most part caricatures, hob-goblins and ghouls, the graphic work of Hugo is that of a visionary. Wood engravers beautifully reproduced these visions as illustrations for Le Rhin ('The Rhine') or Les Travailleurs de la Mer ('The Toilers of the Sea'). Drawn beside cursed romantic castles and storm-tossed lighthouses, ink blots become angels or skeletons, accidental stains become souls or flowers, ambiguities and metamorphoses provide prodigious leaven for the imagination: 'The magnificent imagination which flows through the drawings of Victor Hugo like the mystery in the sky' (Baudelaire). ~ Philippe Jullian

It's the story that was to big for me to tell, the one that grew to fill the depths of my being the far corners of my mind. It's how I lost my system of meaning.
But I haven't lost everything.
Somewhere, somehow, adrift in the sea and far from the stars, I've found faith.
In myself.
And that makes all the difference. ~ Stephanie Kuehn

What say you, can you love the gentleman?
This night you shall behold him at our feast.
Read o'er the volume of young Paris' face,
And find delight writ there with beauty's pen;
Examine every married lineament,
And see how one another lends content;
And what obscured in this fair volume lies
Find written in the margent of his eyes.
This precious book of love, this unbound lover,
To beautify him only lacks a cover.
The fish lives in the sea, and 'tis much pride
For fair without the fair within to hide.
That book in many's eyes doth share the glory,
That in gold clasps locks in the golden story.
So shall you share all that he doth possess,
By having him, making yourself no less. ~ William Shakespeare

That was what, ultimately, war did to you. It was not the physical dangers
the mines at sea, the bombs from the air, the crisp ping of a rifle bullet as you drove over a desert track. No, it was the spiritual danger of learning how much easier life was if you ceased to think. ~ Agatha Christie

God sleepeth not, and He will visit His judgement upon you. Better were it for you to have a millstone hung about your neck and sink into the sea than to be hated and despised of all men. ~ Helen Keller

I find the Doomsday picture Al Gore is painting - a six-meter sea level rise, fifteen times the IPCC number - entirely without merit ... I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached. ~ Hendrik Tennekes

Man is one; and he hath one great heart. It is thus we feel, with a gigantic throb athwart the sea, each other's rights and wrongs; thus are we men. ~ Philip James Bailey

Into that world inverted where left is always right, where the shadows are really the body, where we stay awake all night, where the heavens are shallow as the sea is now deep, and you love me." - Elizabeth Bishop, from Insomnia ~ Tina Ann Forkner

Fog rolled in like a form of sorrow. To live exiled from a place you have known intimately is to experience sensory deprivation. A wide-awake coma ... The sea was a memory bank into which everything fell and was lost. I dove in but came out empty-handed. ~ Gretel Ehrlich

While you live your life aboard the ship of life be aware of the sea of life on which it floats and on which it moves forward; be aware of the prevailing winds and currents that influence your progress as the master of the ship. ~ Ian Gardner

[I]f my faith depends on fear of punishment, what will happen to my faith when perfect love (Jesus) comes to cast it out? (1 John 4: 18) If God thinks that fear of punishment is something to be "cast out" like a demon, then our Gospel and our preaching better not rest on that foundation! Fear-based faith (a paradox) is the ultimate deception. We need to examine closely whether the devil has been hiding in plain sight - squatting within the very message that we've preached. Parasite and deceiver that he is, he found the ultimate host to help disseminate his terror campaign - the Church! If our faith message begins in fear, as it did for many evangelicals like me, it's in trouble. I am reminded of Jesus' warning, "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are" (Matt 23:15). The negation of negation. Does preaching on hell produce converts? Oh yes! But if in the process it also saddles someone with fear of punishment, then it has simultaneously reproduced a "son of hell. ~ Bradley Jersak

For when one thinks of Guiana one thinks of a country whose inadequate resources are strained in every way, a country whose geography imposes on it an administration and a programme of public works out of all proportion to its revenue and population. One thinks of the sea-wall, forever being breached and repaired; the dikes made of mud for want of money; the dirt roads and their occasional experimental surfacing; the roads that are necessary but not yet made; the decadent railways ('Three-fourths of the passenger rolling stock,' says a matter-of-fact little note in the government paper on the Development Programme, 'is old and nearing the point beyond which further repairs will be impossible'); the three overworked Dakotas and two Grumman seaplanes of British Guiana Airways. And one thinks of the streets of Albouystown, as crowded with children as a schoolyard during recess. ~ V.S. Naipaul

The challenge, however, is that Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon do not publish their algorithms. In fact, the methods they use to filter the information you see are deeply proprietary and the "secret sauce" that drives each company's profitability. The problem with this invisible "black box" algorithmic approach to information is that we do not know what has been edited out for us and what we are not seeing. As a result, our digital lives, mediated through a sea of screens, are being actively manipulated and filtered on a daily basis in ways that are both opaque and indecipherable. ~ Marc Goodman

The sea is a desert of waves,
A wilderness of water. ~ Langston Hughes

Nights and days came and passed
and summer and winter
and the sun and the wind
and the rain.
and it was good to be a little island
a part of the world
and a world of its own
all surrounded by the bright blue sea. ~ Margaret Wise Brown

[He] seemed at home and content now they were sailing, as though leaving the port meant the cessation of all his worries, and heading out to sea a new era of peace and amenity. ~ Jack Kerouac

And sitting there, sea drifting in around them, Wolf had understood for the first time what kind of life he wanted to live with Faith. Maybe they wouldn't rise up into the sky the way he'd thought, maybe the real thing was doing what his parents had done, pay the rent, read the paper, hell, maybe that was the dare. To live
day in, day out. Just live. ~ Jennifer Egan

Your sort, always combining flavors! Sea urchins have to taste also like lemon, sugar also like chocolate, love also like paradise! ~ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

The jamaat was an almost silly mish-mash of people: Rude Dawud's pork-pie hat poking up here, a jalab-and-turban there, Jehangir's big Mohawk rising from a sea of kufis, Amazing Ayyub still with no shirt, girls scattered throughout – some in hejab, some not and Rabeya in punk-patched burqa doing her thing. But in its randomness it was gorgeous, reflecting an Islam I felt could not happen anywhere else ... If Islam was to be saved, it would be saved by the crazy ones: Jehangir and Rabeya and Fasiq and Dawud and Ayyub and even Umar. ~ Michael Muhammad Knight