Best 159 quotes in «sailing quotes» category

Hark, now hear the sailors cry, Smell the sea, and feel the sky, Let your soul & spirit fly, into the mystic. - Into the Mystic

Evelyn continued to hold the wheel, recognizing the sensation of being in control of the rudder, while Martin explained how the direction of the wind was key, and how all the elements worked together to affect speed. "It's physics," she said, becoming fascinated by the complexity of the air and water flow working together, and comprehending how the shape of the hull and sails and the size of the keel all played an important part in the boat's movement.

For I say there is no other thing that is worse than the sea is for breaking a man, even though he may a very strong one.

He stared at her hard and long, as if he were gauging a cloudbank that might be worth the trouble to sail around rather than through.

Her eyes betrayed no shock at the sights of the quay as they unfolded – not the sweating deckhands, the prostitutes crowding the ship, the hubbub of stalls, including one where three slaves were for sale, their ankles manacled. She might as well have been walking through a country garden as she moved inexorably away from the water.

His introduction throws me. The only time I can envision "Hi, I'm a surgeon" as a fitting introduction is if I were on a gurney in a stark white room and a man wielding a scalpel was standing over me. Plus, it's been a while since we've talked careers with anyone. Jobs are rarely a topic of conversation anymore--they exist in a place and time too far away to seem interesting. "What do you do?" is not a question asked to define someone, because out here we're all working the same jobs: yachties, mechanics, navigators, weather-readers, fishermen, adventure travelers, storytellers.

It’s better to be the rooster than the feather duster.

I dreamt of land but that was so long ago. I don't even know if he still exists.

If you're a sailor, best not know how to swim. Swimming only prolongs the inevitable—if the sea wants you and your time has come.

I have a hunch the world is darker than I could ever imagine and there is less reason for hope than I am able to see. It makes me grateful there is only so much I can see, and I am left mostly with questions. Grateful, also, that hope is not a reasonable thing. Though I have seen my share of darkness, I am spared perceiving much of it. And here is why I hope beyond a reasonable doubt: I think that as the darkness grows, it makes the dim lights that are left seem brighter. And the darker it gets, the brighter the light appears, until it is so luminous, eventually, even falling shadows are filled with it.

It had occurred to her many times that on board it didn’t matter where you were coming from or where you were heading. Each voyage had its own charisma. Like writing a book – word by word – or crossing a country – step by step – each minute had to be lived moment by moment.

If lighthouse becomes a burning candle, flickered upon ocean's insanity. Your sailing heart there anchors to handle the obsessed breeze towards sand dune's vanity.

If you feel that you are rotting in a port, nothing can make you happy other than leaving that port and sailing to new ports!

I really don't know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it's because in addition to the fact that the sea changes, and the light changes, and ships change, it's because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea - whether it is to sail or to watch it - we are going back from whence we came. [Remarks at the Dinner for the America's Cup Crews, September 14 1962]

I scold the worries away. As Ma likes to say, you cannot control the wind, but you can control your sails.

My wife and I said good-bye the next morning in a little sheltered place among the lumber on the wharf; she was one of your women who never like to do their crying before folks. She climbed on the pile of lumber and sat down, a little flushed and quivery, to watch us off. I remember seeing her there with the baby till we were well down the channel. I remember noticing the bay as it grew cleaner, and thinking that I would break off swearing; and I remember cursing Bob Smart like a pirate within an hour. ("Kentucky's Ghost")

Midnight sail and moonlight. I remember sunset, and gentle breeze. Leaving the city lights behind, and gazing at the moon. Mountains of clouds. Waves slapping our boat. It was easy to forget that love has no direction, or need for compass. Let it guide you to its destination. ~ Fidelis O Mkparu, 2016

My belief assumed a form that it commonly assumes among the educated people of our time. This belief was expressed by the word "progress." At the time it seemed to me that this word had meaning. Like any living individual, I was tormented by questions of how to live better. I still had not understood that in answering that one must live according to progress, I was talking just like a person being carried along in a boat by the waves and the wind; without really answering, such a person replies to the only important question-"Where are we to steer?"-by saying, "We are being carried somewhere.

Listen, Miss, boats are supposed to float. Even if they break up, they usually still float and show up on a shore somewhere. There have been no reports of wreckage or abandoned boats. At this point, no news is still good news. Don't worry. It's too early to worry.

Maria didn’t fear the sea but, as taught by her father, she respected its power. In her experience the ocean had no intent to drown travellers.

my mine , I searching for you .. long time in the trip time walls, searching you in was me.. I never felt lonely, this world always sing even at grave heart's being numb to hear your song is .. What the dealt of this life said so breathe in wind singing sinking sailing in waves, and breathe out find me.. in the rain and rivers but you and me are the ocean, you know ? in long time ago the time in this room make you forget.. keep searching time with me and i. put the name your mine to heart of gold until you coming home, behind the tumble light waiting.

Never a ship sails out of bay but carries my heart as a stowaway.

Now I remembered a captain's honor and his only duty: to bring his crew back alive.

Possibly a man who hates the land should dwell on shore forever. Alienation and the long voyages at sea will compel him once again to dream of it, torment him with the absurdity of longing for something that he loathes.

She holds you like a whore in the night, but she'll take your soul and not think twice.

She was an ocean full of storms and sailing in her would have made him lose his path forever. But he was not ready to give up without taking that risk. He set his sail and kept moving into the heart of the ocean until she calmed down. And once the storm was over all he saw was a place that no one could imagine and nobody had ever reached. And in the end the journey was worth it.

So there you have it: hearing voices at sea is not a pathological condition. It’s quite normal. Welcome to the world of illusions at sea. Of mirages, looming, towering, stooping and sinking. Of moons that change size, suns that change shape, horizons that bend, lights that change colour, and sounds that play hide and seek. Of waves that speak, ships that effervesce and whales that turn into baby elephants. For the sea has a lobsterpot full of tricks and illusions to confuse and beguile even the most rational 21st century sailor.

On September 6, 1522, a battered ship appeared on the horizon … A small pilot boat was dispatched to lead the strange ship over the reefs … The vessel they were guiding into the harbor was manned by a skeleton crew of just eighteen sailors and three captives, all of them severely malnourished. … Their captain was dead, as were the officers, the boatswains, and the pilots; in fact, nearly the entire crew had perished … the ship, Victoria, … had departed three years earlier. No one knew what had become of her … Despite the journey’s hardships, Victoria and her diminished crew accomplished what no other ship had ever done before. By sailing west until they reached the East, and then sailing on in the same direction, they had fulfilled an ambition as old as the human imagination, the first circumnavigation of the globe

Paradise” is a suffering word, grossly overused and ineptly devalued in everyday hype and blurb. Yet, tired as it is, it will have to do. Nothing else conveys that sense of place that can inspire a blissful contentment.

Read on and I will tell you what to do in the future to avoid getting smashed and find yourself with nothing but little pieces of drift floating around in the ship's wake.

She enjoyed the sights and sounds of the dockside – ports were places of freedom.

Simply sailing in a new direction you could enlarge the world

So exquisitely perfect was the darkness of the heavens above that one would have difficulty believing it was a prison to the passengers and crew of The Black Witch.

Some jump down off the bridges, some sail towards the horizon… Meaning is always under construction.

The cruising life isn't for all of us. It isn't even for most of us, but it is for some of us, and for a few of us it is essential to survival.

The daily chocolate left Will in high spirits, so that some days he believed he could wheel with the gulls that fished the foaming water close to shore. Now that he felt so free, it came to him that the corner of England, which up till now had been his whole universe, was in fact only a scrap of a boundless realm.

The moon was low but not full. The men set out along the dock in conversation. As they dropped onto the dark beach, Simmons declared, ‘There can be no better place in the world than this.’ Henderson had to agree. The beach was beautiful. The stars lit the sand and balmy air rode in as the waves washed up on paradise

The first glance at the pillow showed me a repulsive sentinel perched upon each end of it--cockroaches as large as peach leaves--fellows with long, quivering antennae and fiery, malignant eyes. They were grating their teeth like tobacco worms, and appeared to be dissatisfied about something. I had often heard that these reptiles were in the habit of eating off sleeping sailors' toe nails down to the quick, and I would not get in the bunk any more. I lay down on the floor. But a rat came and bothered me, and shortly afterward a procession of cockroaches arrived and camped in my hair. In a few moments the rooster was crowing with uncommon spirit and a party of fleas were throwing double somersaults about my person in the wildest disorder, and taking a bite every time they stuck. I was beginning to feel really annoyed. I got up and put my clothes on and went on deck. The above is not overdrawn; it is a truthful sketch of inter-island schooner life.

the presence of an old salt aboard the Elizabeth Seaman was profoundly reassuring. “Iron men in wooden boats,” they were called, as opposed to the wooden men in iron boats of today, like Kittredge, Farmingdale, and Eddie himself. Old salts partook of an origin myth, being close to the root of all things, including language. Eddie had never noticed how much of his own speech derived from the sea, from “keeled over” to “learning the ropes” to “catching the drift” to “freeloader” to “gripe” to “brace up” to “taken aback” to “leeway” to “low profile” to “the bitter end,” or the very last link on a chain. Using these expressions in a practical way made him feel close to something fundamental—a deeper truth whose contours he believed he’d sensed, allegorically, even while still on land. Being at sea had brought Eddie nearer that truth. And the old salts were nearer still.

The seemingly impossible is not the path of the least resistance, but definitely the most rewarding one. Believe that it’s going to happen and tell everyone it’s going happen. Then it will happen. You just need willpower, determination and a smile on your face.

too young to live, too old to die

The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up—flaked up, with rose-water snow.

The winds of fortune tend to favour the sails of those who politely yell out to it, 'Nice to meet you!

They loved the sea. They taught themselves to sail, to navigate and read the weather. Without their mother's knowledge and long before she thought them old enough to sail outside the harbor, they were piloting their catboat all the way to the Isles of Shoals. They were on the return leg of one such excursion when the fickle weather of early spring took an abrupt turn and the sky darkened and the sun vanished and the wind came squalling off the open sea. They were a half mile from the harbor when the storm overtook them. The rain struck in a slashing torrent and the swells hove them so high they felt they might be sent flying--then dropped them into troughs so deep they could see nothing but walls of water the color of iron. They feared the sail would be ripped away. Samuel Thomas wrestled the tiller and John Roger bailed in a frenzy and both were wide-eyed with euphoric terror as time and again they were nearly capsized before at last making the harbor. When they got home and Mary Margaret saw their sodden state she scolded them for dunces and wondered aloud how they could do so well in their schooling when they didn't have sense enough to get out of the rain.

This sometimes happened: from time to time, Dantès, driven out of solitude into the world, felt an imperative need for solitude. And what solitude is more vast and more poetic than that of a ship sailing alone on the sea, in the darkness of night and the silence of infinity, under the eye of the Lord?

Vast tracts of ocean, whether Polynesia, Micronesia or Melanesia, contain island populations that remain outside the modern world. They know about it, they may have traveled to it, they appreciate artifacts and medical help from it, but they live their daily lives much as hundreds of generations of ancestors before them, without money, electricity, phones, TV or manufactured food.

Yeux mi-clos, il humait à présent dans les souffles du large l’âcreté du sel, il écoutait les vents siffler à son oreille, messagers rafraîchissants annonciateurs d’orage. Célian sentait à travers le tissu du hamac la peau réchauffée de Nyssa toujours endormie, sa longue chevelure princière apanagée de la lumière du jour. L’agile équipage de l’Astéropée, muscles tendus, œuvrait d’un bel ensemble autour des écoutes, habitué à manœuvrer les cordages et les voiles sur les mâts protégés de plusieurs couches d’huile de lin ; mais à cet instant les marins qui prenaient leur quart étaient allongés sur le pont pour admirer le lever de soleil.

Whatever the water touched was riparian: that moist layer of air and rich earth along the shore was an Eden for many forms of life. Some drowned in a daily flood, while those that knew how, thrived. There was something riparian too about the people who spent most of their time on the water. Those whose language and equilibrium had been dictated by the elements around them. Who’d learned to hang on in the ever-shifting swell and drift of water under their feet. Contrast and contradictions abounded for those who had learned to meander despite limited space or to be still in the midst of all that rocking.

We are all born in a little port but not all of us sail the vast oceans! Majority remains in the port!

We have the responsibility to care for the ocean as it cares for us