Quotes about sea

Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part.

— Hermann Broch

As usual I finish the day before the sea, sumptuous this evening beneath the moon, which writes Arab symbols with phosphorescent streaks on the slow swells. There is no end to the sky and the waters. How well they accompany sadness!

— Albert Camus

The sea -- this truth must be confessed -- has no generosity. No display of manly qualities -- courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness -- has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.

— Joseph Conrad

The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

— Joseph Conrad

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

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 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

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

When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.

— Samuel Johnson

Wide sea, that one continuous murmur breeds along the pebbled shore of memory!

— John Keats

There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates.

— James Russell Lowell

It is only when we are very happy that we can bear to gaze merrily upon the vast and limitless expanse of water, rolling on and on with such persistent, irritating monotony, to the accompaniment of our thoughts, whether grave or gay. When they are gay, the waves echo their gaiety; but when they are sad, then every breaker, as it rolls, seems to bring additional sadness, and to speak to us of hopelessness and of the pettiness of all our joys.

— Baroness Orczy

There is hope from the sea, but none from the grave.

— Irish Proverb

The ocean, whose tides respond, like women's menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins, the ocean on whose surface vessels (personified as female) can ride but in whose depth sailors meet their death and monsters conceal themselves... it is unstable and threatening as the earth is not; it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives; it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal.

— Adrienne Rich

The sea speaks a language polite people never repeat. It is a colossal scavenger slang and has no respect.

— Carl Sandburg

The sea is mother-death and she is a mighty female, the one who wins, the one who sucks us all up.

— Anne Sexton

Sonnet XXXIV (You are the daughter of the sea) You are the daughter of the sea, oregano's first cousin. Swimmer, your body is pure as the water; cook, your blood is quick as the soil. Everything you do is full of flowers, rich with the earth. Your eyes go out toward the water, and the waves rise; your hands go out to the earth and the seeds swell; you know the deep essence of water and the earth, conjoined in you like a formula for clay. Naiad: cut your body into turquoise pieces, they will bloom resurrected in the kitchen. This is how you become everything that lives. And so at last, you sleep, in the circle of my arms that push back the shadows so that you can rest - vegetables, seaweed, herbs: the foam of your dreams.

— Pablo Neruda