OCEAN QUOTES II
quotations about the ocean
I am the shore and the ocean, awaiting myself on both sides.
DEJAN STOJANOVIC
The Shape
Praise the sea, but keep on land.
GEORGE HERBERT
Jacula Prudentum
Ye waves
That o'er th' interminable ocean wreathe
Your crisped smiles.
AESCHYLUS
Prometheus Chained
To their inhabitants the sea is every thing. Their hopes and fears, their gains and losses, their joys and sorrows, are linked with it; and the largeness of the ocean has moulded their feelings and their characters. They are in a measure partakers of its immensity and its mystery. The commonest of their men have wrestled with the powers of the air, and the might of wind, and wave, and icy cold. The weakest of their women have felt the hallowing touch of sudden calamity, and of long, lonely, life-and-death, watches.
AMELIA E. BARR
A Daughter of Fife
Once more upon the waters! yet once more!
And the waves bound beneath me as a steed
That knows his rider.
LORD BYRON
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
He laid his hand upon "the Ocean's mane,"
And played familiar with his hoary locks.
ROBERT POLLOK
The Course of Time
And Thou, vast Ocean! on whose awful face
Time's iron feet can print no ruin trace.
ROBERT MONTGOMERY
The Omnipresence of the Deity
I have always been fascinated by the ocean, to dip a limb beneath its surface and know that I'm touching eternity, that it goes on forever until it begins here again.
LAUREN DESTEFANO
Wither
The ocean is a big place, even for a whale.
KIERAN MULVANEY
"The loneliest whale in the world", Taranaki Daily News, January 27, 2017
The breaking waves dashed high
On a stern and rock-bound coast,
And the woods against a stormy sky,
Their giant branches toss'd.
FELICIA HEMANS
The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England
After all those millions of years of living inside of the sea, we took the ocean with us. When a woman makes a baby, she gives it water, inside her body, to grow in. That water inside her body is almost exactly the same as the water of the sea. It is salty, by just the same amount. She makes a little ocean, in her body.
GREGORY DAVID ROBERTS
Shantaram
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean--roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin--his control
Stops with the shore.
LORD BYRON
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
I never was on the dull, tame shore,
But I loved the great sea more and more.
BARRY CORNWALL
The Sea
We follow and race
In shifting chase,
Over the boundless ocean-space!
Who hath beheld when the race begun?
Who shall behold it run?
BAYARD TAYLOR
The Waves
Ocean into tempest wrought,
To waft a feather, or to drown a fly.
EDWARD YOUNG
Night Thoughts
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?
And I shall watch the ferry-boats
And they'll get high
On a bluer ocean
Against tomorrow's sky
And I will never grow so old again
And I will walk and talk
In gardens all wet with rain
VAN MORRISON
"Sweet Thing"
Past are three summers since she first beheld
The ocean; all around the child await
Some exclamation of amazement here:
She coldly said, her long-lasht eyes abased,
Is this the mighty ocean? is this all?
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
Gebir
More wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of the ocean. Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent. All my days I have watched it and listened to it, and I know it well. At first it told to me only the plain little tales of calm beaches and near ports, but with the years it grew more friendly and spoke of other things; of things more strange and more distant in space and time.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The White Ship"
Crime and the sea have always mixed, pirates ever since there have been ships, law ends with the land, man is nothing out there, a few bubbles as he goes down under the mindless waves.
JOHN UPDIKE
Rabbit at Rest