Sailing Quotes

Calm sailing doesn't come from calm waters, it comes from having a good navigator; a good crew and a good vessel.

~ Anthony T. Hincks

Life is a voyage across troubled waters where our days are often spent clinging to the top of the highest mast, scouting for a comforting glimpse of shore.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

I wrapped my fingers around the first light I saw and felt all at once so happy and so sad and so free. My hand was cold somehow as I lifted the tiny star out of the water and brought its trembling, burning form to my face. I kissed it gently and laughed like a child as my face seemed to become angelic for a few moments. The star laughed back at me in little sweet notes, and I released it back to the sea. I can still feel the star in my hands to this day. You can have your noctiluca scintillans, your petty protists in the sea. I prefer to sail among the stars.

~ K.b. Ezzell

To reach a port we must set sail –Sail, not tie at anchorSail, not drift.

~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

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

~ Jimmy Spithill

I can't control the wind but I can adjust the sail.

~ Ricky Skaggs

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.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Flying might not be all plain sailing, but the fun of it is worth the price.

~ Amelia Earhart

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

~ Carsten Jensen

She found out that having something to do prevented you from feeling seasick, and that even a job like scrubbing a deck could be satisfying, if it was done in a seamanlike way. She was very taken with this notion, and later on she folded the blankets on her bunk in a seamanlike way, and put her possessions in the closet in a seamanlike way, and used 'stow' instead of 'tidy' for the process of doing so. After two days at sea, Lyra decided that this was the life for her.

~ Philip Pullman

What she really loved was to hang over the edge and watch the bow of the ship slice through the waves. She loved it especially when the waves were high and the ship rose and fell, or when it was snowing and the flakes stung her face.

~ Kristin Cashore

We clear the harbor and the wind catches her sails and my beautiful ship leans over ever so gracefully, and her elegant bow cuts cleanly into the increasing chop of the waves. I take a deep breath and my chest expands and my heart starts thumping so strongly I fear the others might see it beat through the cloth of my jacket. I face the wind and my lips peel back from my teeth in a grin of pure joy.

~ L.a. Meyer

...this beginning motion, this first time when a sail truly filled and the boat took life and knifed across the lake under perfect control, this was so beautiful it stopped my breath...

~ Gary Paulsen

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.

~ Yukio Mishima

Thing about boats is, you can always sell them if you don't like them. Can't sell kids.

~ Lin Pardey

You can’t believe how bleeding scary the sea is! There’s, like, whales and storms and shit! They don’t bloody tell you that!

~ Libba Bray

With this idea, being a man with long experience of the sea (and they certainly have a great advantage over other men in any sort of task)...

~ Garcilaso De La Vega

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

~ Herman Melville

She loved the sea. She liked the sharp salty smell of the air, and the vastness of the horizons bounded only by a vault of azure sky above. It made her feel small, but free as well.

~ George R.r. Martin

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.

~ Andrew Rayner

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.

~ James Carlos Blake

That's what sailing is, a dance, and your partner is the sea. And with the sea you never take liberties. You ask her, you don't tell her. You have to remember always that she's the leader, not you. You and your boat are dancing to her tune.

~ Michael Morpurgo

Charter boats are like books with no covers.

~ Tania Aebi

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)

~ Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

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

~ Laurence Bergreen

What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.

~ Thomas Merton

Clouds do not really look like camels or sailing ships or castles in the sky. They are simply a natural process at work. So too, perhaps, are our lives.

~ Roger Ebert

Design has taken the place of what sailing used to be.

~ Dennis Conner

The romantic appeal of solar sailing has ensured that its advocates consistently come from the worlds of both science fiction and science fact.

~ Thomas Mallon

I use filming as an excuse to take classes. I got my certification in sailing for 'Wedding Crashers,' and now I can handle a 26-foot boat. I played a seamstress once, so I took sewing classes. I love dipping into these other lives.

~ Rachel Mcadams