Famous Quotes & Sayings

Herman Melville

This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders.

Herman Melville

Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean's noblest traits... they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew.

Herman Melville

A hermitage in the forest is the refuge of the narrow-minded misanthrope; a hammock on the ocean is the asylum for the generous distressed.

Herb Ritts

I abstract it in my photographs: I like large planes and spaces, areas of texture and light, like deserts or oceans or monumental places.

Henry David Thoreau

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. [It allows you to] be the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clark of your own streams and oceans; [to] explore your own higher latitudes; [to] be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

Henry David Thoreau

My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness!

Henry David Thoreau

The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences.

Henry David Thoreau

It is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, ina government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone.

Henry David Thoreau

Before the land rose out of the ocean, and became dry land, chaos reigned; and between high and low water mark, where she is partially disrobed and rising, a sort of chaos reigns still, which only anomalous creatures can inhabit.

Henry David Thoreau

Open all your pores and bathe in all the tides of nature, in all her streams and oceans, at all seasons.

Henry David Thoreau

It seemed to me that man himself was like a half-emptied bottle of pale ale, which Time had drunk so far, yet stoppled tight for a while, and drifting about in the ocean of circumstances, but destined ere-long to mingle with the surrounding waves, or be spilled amid the sands of a distant shore.

Henry David Thoreau

It might be seen by what tenure men held the earth. The smallest stream is mediterranean sea, a smaller ocean creek within the land, where men may steer by their farm bounds and cottage lights. For my own part, but for the geographers, I should hardly have known how large a portion of our globe is water, my life has chiefly passed within so deep a cove. Yet I have sometimes ventured as far as to the mouth of my Snug Harbor.

Henry David Thoreau

In clear weather the laziest may look across the Bay as far as Plymouth at a glance, or over the Atlantic as far as human vision reaches, merely raising his eyelids; or if he is too lazy to look after all, he can hardly help hearing the ceaseless dash and roar of the breakers. The restless ocean may at any moment cast up a whale or a wrecked vessel at your feet. All the reporters in the world, the most rapid stenographers, could not report the news it brings.

Jill Tarter

The space that we're looking through is nine-dimensional. If you build a mathematical model, the amount of searching that we've done in 50 years is equivalent to scooping one 8-ounce glass out of the Earth's ocean, looking and seeing if you caught a fish. No, no fish in that glass? Well, I don't think you're going to conclude that there are no fish in the ocean. You just haven't searched very well yet. That's where we are.

Esther Hicks

"Ask, and it is given" means that whether you are a full blossoming genius human, or whether you are the one-celled amoeba in the ocean, or a cell in one of your bodies, when it is concluded that something else is preferred (no matter how developed the consciousness is) every time a preference is noted, Nonphysical Energy rushes forth to answer it. It is the promise of our evolving beingness.

Ernest Hemingway

The ocean is worth writing about just as man is.

Ernest Hemingway

Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel?

Etty Hillesum

Our desire must be like a slow and stately ship, sailing across endless oceans, never in search of safe anchorage. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, it will find mooring for a moment.

Erwin Schrodinger

Why are atoms so small? ... Many examples have been devised to bring this fact home to an audience, none of them more impressive than the one used by Lord Kelvin: Suppose that you could mark the molecules in a glass of water, then pour the contents of the glass into the ocean and stir the latter thoroughly so as to distribute the marked molecules uniformly throughout the seven seas; if you then took a glass of water anywhere out of the ocean, you would find in it about a hundred of your marked molecules.

Florynce Kennedy

You can't dump one cup of sugar into the ocean and expect to get syrup. If everybody sweetened her own cup of water, then things would begin to change.

Florence Welch

I want my music to sound like throwing yourself out of a tree, or off a tall building, or as if you’re being sucked down into the ocean and you can’t breathe… It’s something overwhelming and all-encompassing that fills you up, and you’re either going to explode with it, or you’re just going to disappear.

Flannery O'Connor

Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will.

Henry Miller

It isn't the oceans which cut us off from the world - it's the American way of looking at things.

Henry Miller

Giving and receiving are at bottom one thing, dependent on whether one lives open or closed. Living openly one becomes a medium, a transmitter; living thus, as a river, one experiences life to the full, flows along with the current of life, and dies in order to live again as an ocean.

George Eliot

Man finds his pathways: at first they were foot-tracks, as those of the beast in the wilderness; now they are swift and invisible: his thought dives through the ocean, and his wishes thread the air: has he found all the pathways yet? What reaches him, stays with him, rules him: he must accept it, not knowing its pathway.

Grace Gealey

I need the sun, sand and ocean to rejuvenate my spirit, the food to enliven my body and all of the familiar places, friends and family to revitalize my soul. I go for replenishment. For a kind of love that I truly know. For a place of belonging, always.

Gouverneur Morris

I anticipate the day when to command respect in the remotest regions it will be sufficient to say I am an American. Our flag shall then wave in glory over the ocean and our commerce feel no restraint but what our own government may impose. Happy thrice happy day. Thank God, to reach this envied state we need only to will. Yes my countrymen. Our destiny depends on our will. But if we would stand high on the record of time that will must be inflexible.

Harvey V. Fineberg

At the bottom of the ocean, bacteria that are thermophilic and can survive at the steam vent heat that would otherwise produce, if fish were there, sous-vide cooked fish, nevertheless, have managed to make that a hospitable environment for them.

Jamaica Kincaid

I come from a little island with the Caribbean Sea on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. I come from, really, nowhere, and for me, the fiction and the nonfiction, creative or otherwise, all come from the same place.

James Garner

We know what the surface of the moon is better than we know what the surface of the sea floor is.

Ellen Bass

If you’ve managed to do one good thing, the ocean doesn’t care. But when Newton’s apple fell toward the earth, the earth, ever so slightly, fell toward the apple as well.

Jennifer Hudson

You have to want weight-loss success so badly that no mountain, river, or ocean could keep you from reaching your goals. If you have that drive, passion, and commitment, there is no way you won’t get there.

Jeff Bridges

I kind of quit surfing when I got out of high school, but then a few years ago I started to take it up again. I'm not an expert by any means, but it's so wonderful to get out in the ocean and get a different perspective on things.