Ocean quotes
2.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside ocean — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"[On Jane Austen:] To believe her limited in range because she was harmonious in method is as sensible as to imagine that when the Atlantic Ocean is as smooth as a mill-pond it shrinks to the size of a mill-pond."
"Life began three and a half billion years ago, necessarily about as simple as it could be, because life arose spontaneously from the organic compounds in the primeval oceans."
"You and I have spoken all these words, but for the way we have to go,words are no preparation. I have one small drop of knowing in my soul. Let it dissolve in your ocean"
"That word is 'willing.' It's an attitude and spirit of cooperation that should permeate our conversations. It's like a palm tree by the ocean that endures the greatest winds because it knows how to gracefully bend."
"The virtues are lost in self-interest as rivers are lost in the sea."
"In the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get, the easier the sinking."
"The Ganga to me is the symbol of India's memorable past which has been flowing into the present and continues to flow towards the ocean of the future."
"It is of great use to the sailor to know the length of his line, though he cannot with it fathom all the depths of the ocean."
"Love builds up the broken wall and straightens the crooked path. Love keeps the stars in the firmament and imposes rhythm on the ocean tides. Each of us is created of it and I suspect each of us was created for it."
"Loving another person is not separate from loving God. One is a single wave, the other is the ocean."
"Eventually man, too, found his way back to the sea. Standing on its shores, he must have looked out upon it with wonder and curiosity, compounded with an unconscious recognition of his lineage. He could not physically re-enter the ocean as the seals and whales had done. But over the centuries, with all the skill and ingenuity and reasoning powers of his mind, he has sought to explore and investigate even its most remote parts, so that he might re-enter it mentally and imaginatively."
"It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist: the threat is rather to life itself."
"Do you ever wonder how much deeper the ocean would be without sponges?"
"Be quiet now and wait. It may be that the ocean one, the one we desire so to move into and become, desires us out here on land a little longer, going our sundry roads to the shore."
"There is an old story from the Eastern tradition that says that when the gods created the universe, they found a place for everything but the truth, and this created a problem, because the gods did not want this wisdom discovered right away. One of the gods suggested the top of the highest mountain, another the farthest star, a third spoke up for the dark side of the moon, and another for the bottom of the deepest ocean. Finally, they decide to place truth inside the human heart. In that way, we would search for it all over the universe, with the secret within us all the time."
"Don't try to describe the ocean if you've never seen it."
"I have never cared about setting world records, or filling my boat with fish, or, for that matter, even catching fish. I go for the experience of spending six hours in the arms of the ocean, never thinking of a single thing except chasing fish."
"Knowledge of the oceans is more than a matter of curiosity. Our very survival may hinge upon it."
"I would like to say, for the record, that I am in favor of using more American Indians and other minorities in motion pictures, I am against polluting the oceans of the world, I am for every nationality having its own homeland, I am against whacking baby seals on the head, and I am for saving the whales."
"This means that we have barely disembarked into life, that we've only just now been born, let's not fill our mouths with so many uncertain names, with so many sad labels, with so many pompous letters, with so much yours and mine, with so much signing of papers. I intend to confuse things, to unite them, make them new-born intermingle them, undress them, until the light of the world has the unity of the ocean, a generous wholeness, a fragrance alive and crackling."
