There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.
Herman Melville

At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that respect.
Herman Melville

The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
Vladimir Nabokov

For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed for it, for all the celebrations it has been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
Joseph Conrad

A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns.
Joseph Conrad

The sea - this truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness - has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.
Joseph Conrad

There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.
Joseph Conrad

The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
Joseph Conrad

A modern fleet of ships does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a highway.
Joseph Conrad

The sea from Dunkirk to Dover during these days of the evacuation looked like any coastal road in England on a bank holiday. It was solid with shipping.
Douglas Bader

Like ships that have gone down at sea, when heaven was all tranquillity.
Thomas Moore

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
John Updike

Virtue could see to do what Virtue would by her own radiant light, though sun and moon where in the flat sea sunk.
John Milton

The man who has experienced shipwreck shudders even at a calm sea.
Ovid

I have always heard, Sancho, that doing good to base fellows is like throwing water into the sea.
Miguel De Cervantes

A sea setting us upon the ice has brought us close to danger.
Henry Hudson

There is no sea more dangerous than the ocean of practical politics none in which there is more need of good pilotage and of a single, unfaltering purpose when the waves rise high.
Thomas Huxley

The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.
Isak Dinesen

Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it.
Samuel Beckett

At night, when the sky is full of stars and the sea is still you get the wonderful sensation that you are floating in space.
Natalie Wood