Ocean, Sea & Sailing Quotes

Thoreau, Henry David; 1817-1862

The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a Belgian jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences. Serpents, bears, hyenas, tigers rapidly vanish as civilization advances, but the most populous and civilized city cannot scare a shark far from its wharves.
Quote attributed to Henry David Thoreau; Cape Cod (1855-1865), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 4, p. 188, Houghton Mifflin (1906)


A man was to live in that egg-shell day and night, a mile from the shore.... Think of making your bed thus in the crest of a breaker! To have the waves, like a pack of hungry wolves, eying you always, night and day, and from time to time making a spring at you, almost sure to have you at last.
Quote attributed to Henry David Thoreau; Cape Cod (1855-1865), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 4, p. 263, Houghton Mifflin (1906)


The sea, vast and wild as it is, bears thus the waste and wrecks of human art to its remotest shore. There is no telling what it may not vomit up.
Quote attributed to Henry David Thoreau; Cape Cod (1855-1865), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 4, p. 115, Houghton Mifflin (1906)


He is the best sailor who can steer within the fewest points of the wind, and extract a motive power out of the greatest obstacles. Most begin to veer and tack as soon as the wind changes from aft, and as within the tropics it does not blow from all points of the compass, there are some harbors which they can never reach.
Quote attributed to Henry David Thoreau; A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 1, p. 362, Houghton Mifflin (1906)


We do not associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always. The Indians have left no traces on its surface, but it is the same to the civilized man and the savage. The aspect of the shore only has changed.
Quote attributed to Henry David Thoreau; Cape Cod (1855-1865), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 4, p. 188, Houghton Mifflin (1906)


It is generally supposed that they who have long been conversant with the ocean can foretell, by certain indications, such as its roar and the notes of sea-fowl, when it will change from calm to storm; but probably no such ancient mariner as we dream of exists; they know no more, at least, than the older sailors do about this voyage of life on which we are all embarked. Nevertheless, we love to hear the sayings of old sailors, and their accounts of natural phenomena which totally ignore, and are ignored by, science; and possibly they have not always looked over the gunwale so long in vain.
Quote attributed to Henry David Thoreau; Cape Cod (1855-1865), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 4, p. 126, Houghton Mifflin (1906)


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.
Quote attributed to Henry David Thoreau; Cape Cod (1855-1865), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 4, p. 71, Houghton Mifflin (1906)


On the whole, we were glad of the storm, which would show us the ocean in its angriest mood.
Quote attributed to Henry David Thoreau; Cape Cod (1855-1865), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 4, p. 40, Houghton Mifflin (1906)


It is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a 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.... It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.
Quote attributed to Henry David Thoreau; Walden, "Conclusion," (1854)


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.
Quote attributed to Henry David Thoreau; Cape Cod (1855-1865), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 4, p. 184, Houghton Mifflin (1906)


We thought it would be worth the while to read the epitaphs where so many were lost at sea; however, as not only their lives, but commonly their bodies also, were lost or not identified, there were fewer epitaphs of this sort than we expected, though there were not a few. Their graveyard is the ocean.
Quote attributed to Henry David Thoreau; Cape Cod (1855-1865), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 4, p. 148, Houghton Mifflin (1906)


It was a poetic recreation to watch those distant sails steering for half-fabulous ports, whose very names are a mysterious music to our ears.... It is remarkable that men do not sail the sea with more expectation. Nothing was ever accomplished in a prosaic mood.
Quote attributed to Henry David Thoreau; Cape Cod (1855-1865), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 4, pp. 120-121, Houghton Mifflin (1906)


If rightly made, a boat would be a sort of amphibious animal, a creature of two elements, related by one half its structure to some swift and shapely fish, and by the other to some strong-winged and graceful bird.
Quote attributed to Henry David Thoreau; A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 1, p. 13, Houghton Mifflin (1906)


They will tell you tough stories of sharks all over the Cape, which I do not presume to doubt utterly,-how they will sometimes upset a boat, or tear it in pieces, to get at the man in it. I can easily believe in the undertow, but I have no doubt that one shark in a dozen years is enough to keep up the reputation of a beach a hundred miles long.
Quote attributed to Henry David Thoreau; Cape Cod (1855-1865), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 4, p. 112, Houghton Mifflin (1906)