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Progenitor and Sustainer of Life
The sea is feline. It licks your feet.
The Professor at the Breakfast-Table, 1860
The seas are the heart's blood of the earth.
The Headlong Wave
in The Outermost House, 1928
What fairy-like music steals over the sea,
Entrancing our senses with charmed melody?
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!
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."
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?
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.
Remarks, New York Post
5 September 1956
For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
It's always ourself we find in the sea
maggie and millie and mollie and may
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.
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.
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.
The Mirror of the Sea, 1906
The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.
Society and Solitude
Civilization, 1870
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.
The Sea Around Us, 1950
Come o'er the moonlit sea,
The waves are brightly glowing.
Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part.
The Spell, 1976
The sea! the sea! the open sea!
The blue, the fresh, the ever free!
We are as near to heaven by sea as by land.
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.
I never was on the dull, tame shore,
But I loved the great sea more and more.
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.
Lord Jim, 1900
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.
The Scarlet Pimpernel, 1905
When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.
Life of Samuel Johnson
by James Boswell, 1791
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!
American Journals
3 July 1949 entry, 1978
