OCEAN QUOTES IV

quotations about the ocean

Ocean quote

There is an energy to the ocean in particular, an element of danger that requires a giving over of self, that makes swimming in heavy water a kind of holy communion. I see swimming as a way to get to know a place with an intimacy that I otherwise wouldn't have. To swim in the ocean is to immerse myself in wildness, to feel the way the water rises and falls like breath.

BONNIE TSUI

"In Hawaii, a Swimmer's Communion With the Wild Ocean", New York Times, February 2, 2017


The ocean is a big place, even for a whale.

KIERAN MULVANEY

"The loneliest whale in the world", Taranaki Daily News, January 27, 2017


Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man.

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

Thanatopsis

Tags: William Cullen Bryant


I never was on the dull, tame shore,
But I loved the great sea more and more.

BARRY CORNWALL

The Sea


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

Tags: Lord Byron


Miles of ocean, and oh, the vastness of it, shadows and salt, fierce dark water filled with alien emptiness and the monsters that lived there. Imagine falling into that water and knowing it was below you, even as you treaded water, desperately trying to remain on the surface; the terror of the realization of what was under you--miles and miles of nothingness and monsters, blackness stretching away everywhere and the sea floor so far below--would tear your mind apart.

CASSANDRA CLARE

Lady Midnight


Tut! the best thing I know between France and England is the sea.

DOUGLAS JERROLD

Jerrold's Wit


The ocean is powerful, but not invincible. It is rich, but not inexhaustible. For humans to thrive in the coming centuries, we will have to be smarter about how we approach the 70 percent of our planet the ocean covers.

GARY E. KNELL

"Securing a Bold, Blue, and Prosperous Future for Our Ocean", National Geographic, January 27, 2017


The great depths of the ocean are entirely unknown to us; soundings cannot reach them. What fanes in those remote depths, what beings live twelve or fifteen miles beneath the surface of the waters, what is the organization of the animals we can scarcely conjecture?

JULES VERNE

Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea


It is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance that is in this Earth; and many of the Children of Ilúvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen.

J. R. R. TOLKIEN

The Silmarillion

Tags: J. R. R. Tolkien