Swimming quotes
592 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside swimming — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature"
"You have to have other things in your life apart from swimming to focus on. It's not going to be just swimming in my life."
"I have a very great fear of love. It is so personal. Let each bird fly with its own wings, and each fish swim its own course.--Morning brings more than love. And I want to be true to the morning."
"There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes 'What the hell is water?'"
"Inside I'm treading waters steady tryna swim ashore."
"You better start swimming, or you'll sink like a stone. Because the Time's they are a-changing."
"Only mediocre people are at the best all the time."
"Nothing can injure a man's writing if he's a first-rate writer. If a man is not a first-rate writer, there's not anything can help it much. The problem does not apply if he is not first rate because he has already sold his soul for a swimming pool."
"We've greatly exaggerated the risk of sinking, without celebrating the value of swimming."
"Anyone whose mission is keeping people apart is swimming against a very strong tide."
"You can't beat sex outdoors, but there are not many places I haven't done it. Forests, barns, in swimming pool changing rooms, on top of hills, you name it."
"Fantasy gets a mixed reception - a lot of fantasy is formulaic but most of the award-winning fantasy on the contrary tends to be the stuff at the edges of the genre, rather than swimming in the middle."
"England always seems to me like a man swimming with his clothes on his head."
"I love swimming, swimming's my passion and I hope I swim until the last day of my life, so I really, really do enjoy swimming, but swimming for me is simply a way of carrying a message."
"The first opinion that occurs to us when we are suddenly asked about something is usually not our own but only the current one pertaining to our class, position, or parentage; our own opinions seldom swim on the surface."
"She kept swimming out into life because she hadn't yet found a rock to stand on."
"No one had ever done a swimming movie before so we just made it up as we went along. I ad-libbed all my own underwater movements."
"I tried synchronized swimming, but felt, over time, I was just going through the motions."
"Just getting in the pool for seven straight hours is unbearable to me.... It's grueling. There's nothing physically pleasurable about it. If you're doing a hard workout, you're throwing up in the gutter. At night you cling to your pillow and just hope that your body revives before you have to go back and do it again."
"The Olympics are getting mixed reviews. People are angry at NBC for showing a promo that revealed the winner of a swimming event even though the race hadn't aired yet. NBC apologized saying, 'We're just not used to people watching our network.'"
