Sailing Quotes

“She loved the sea. She liked the sharp salty smell of the air, and the vastness of the horizons bounded only by a vault of azure sky above. It made her feel small, but free as well.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords

“If you're a sailor, best not know how to swim. Swimming only prolongs the inevitable—if the sea wants you and your time has come.”
― James Clavell, Tai-Pan

“If lighthouse becomes a burning candle,
flickered upon ocean's insanity.
Your sailing heart there anchors to handle
the obsessed breeze towards sand dune's vanity.”
― Munia Khan

“Turn over the rudder in God's name, and sail with the wind heaven sends us.”
― Catherine of Siena

“Life is a voyage across troubled waters where our days are often spent clinging to the top of the highest mast, scouting for a comforting glimpse of shore.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes: Quotes, Thoughts, & a Little Poetry for Every Day of the Year

“The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up—flaked up, with rose-water snow.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“This sometimes happened: from time to time, Dantès, driven out of solitude into the world, felt an imperative need for solitude. And what solitude is more vast and more poetic than that of a ship sailing alone on the sea, in the darkness of night and the silence of infinity, under the eye of the Lord?”
― Alexandre Dumas

“We of the sea come to know each other quickly; our loves, like our hates, are born of sudden dangers.”
― Lew Wallace, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

“Never a ship sails out of bay but carries my heart as a stowaway.”
― Roselle Mercier Montgomery

“When a great adventure is launched with a powerful thrust, fatigue in the muscles and doubts in the mind are swept away by a fullness that moves life along like a breath from the depths of the soul.”
― Bernard Moitessier, Tamata and the Alliance

“Make no tent on thy ship;
Never sleep in a house;
For a foe within doors you may view.
On a shield sleeps the Viking, sword in his hand,
And his tent is the heavenly blue.

When the storm rages fierce,
Hoist the sail to the top.
Oh, how merry the Storm-King appears!
Let us rise, let her drive;
Better founder than strike,
For who strikes is a slave to his fears.”
― The Northmen; A Viking Saga

“The moon was low but not full. The men set out along the dock in conversation. As they dropped onto the dark beach, Simmons declared, ‘There can be no better place in the world than this.’

Henderson had to agree. The beach was beautiful. The stars lit the sand and balmy air rode in as the waves washed up on paradise”
― Sara Sheridan, On Starlit Seas

“She holds you like a whore in the night, but she'll take your soul and not think twice.”
― Micheal Rivers, The Black Witch

“Paradise” is a suffering word, grossly overused and ineptly devalued in everyday hype and blurb. Yet, tired as it is, it will have to do. Nothing else conveys that sense of place that can inspire a blissful contentment.”
― Andrew Rayner, Reach for Paradise

“We simply can’t abandon ship every time we encounter a storm in our marriage. Real love is about weathering the storms of life together.”
― Seth Adam Smith

“She enjoyed the sights and sounds of the dockside – ports were places of freedom.”
― Sara Sheridan, On Starlit Seas

“All right boys, let’s sail away! Show those bastards how airship pirates fly a ship!”
― Katherine McIntyre, An Airship Named Desire

“Gluppit the prawling strangles, there!”
― Patrick O'Brian

“All these thoughts of love and strife
Glimmered through his lurid life,
As the stars' intenser light
Through the red flames o'er him trailing,
As his ships went sailing, sailing,
Northward in the summer night.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“The cruising life isn't for all of us. It isn't even for most
of us, but it is for some of us, and for a few of us it is essential to survival.”
― Jim Trefethen, The Cruising Life: A Commonsense Guide for the Would-Be Voyager

“Read on and I will tell you what to do in the future to avoid getting smashed and find yourself with nothing but little pieces of drift floating around in the ship's wake.”
― John W. Trimmer, How to Avoid Huge Ships

“Don't stop and drift in the middle of the traffic lane, even if the fish are biting. The fish you catch might weigh many tons and have a propeller on the end and a bulbous bow on the other.”
― John W. Trimmer, How to Avoid Huge Ships

“Her eyes betrayed no shock at the sights of the quay as they unfolded – not the sweating deckhands, the prostitutes crowding the ship, the hubbub of stalls, including one where three slaves were for sale, their ankles manacled. She might as well have been walking through a country garden as she moved inexorably away from the water.”
― Sara Sheridan, On Starlit Seas

“Maria didn’t fear the sea but, as taught by her father, she respected its power. In her experience the ocean had no intent to drown travellers.”
― Sara Sheridan, On Starlit Seas

“It had occurred to her many times that on board it didn’t matter where you were coming from or where you were heading. Each voyage had its own charisma. Like writing a book – word by word – or crossing a country – step by step – each minute had to be lived moment by moment.”
― Sara Sheridan, On Starlit Seas

“So exquisitely perfect was the darkness of the heavens above that one would have difficulty believing it was a prison to the passengers and crew of The Black Witch.”
― Micheal Rivers, The Black Witch

“Vast tracts of ocean, whether Polynesia, Micronesia or Melanesia, contain island populations that remain outside the modern world. They know about it, they may have traveled to it, they appreciate artifacts and medical help from it, but they live their daily lives much as hundreds of generations of ancestors before them, without money, electricity, phones, TV or manufactured food.”
― Andrew Rayner, Reach for Paradise

“A soft landing covers a multitude of sins.”
― Katherine Starbird, Reenie Gyse

“He stared at her hard and long, as if he were gauging a cloudbank that might be worth the trouble to sail around rather than through.”
― A.S. Peterson, Fiddler's Green

“The daily chocolate left Will in high spirits, so that some days he believed he could wheel with the gulls that fished the foaming water close to shore. Now that he felt so free, it came to him that the corner of England, which up till now had been his whole universe, was in fact only a scrap of a boundless realm.”
― Sara Sheridan, On Starlit Seas