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Quotes About Sea

Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded
~ Joseph Conrad
The idleness of a passenger, my isolation amongst all these men with whom I had no point of contact, the oily and languid sea, the uniform sombreness of the coast, seemed to keep me away from the truth of these things, within the toil of a mournful and senseless delusion. The voice of the surf now and then was a positive pleasure, like the speech of a brother. It was something natural, that had its reason, that had a meaning.
~ Joseph Conrad
The sea, perhaps because of its saltiness, roughens the outside but keeps sweet the kernel of its servants' soul.
~ Joseph Conrad
Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks and months fall away quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily as the light air-bubbles in the swirls of the ship's wake, and vanish into a great silence in which your ship moves on with a sort of magical effect.
~ Joseph Conrad
It is a great doctor for sore hearts and sore heads, too, your ship's routine, which I have seen soothe—at least for a time—the most turbulent of spirits. There is health in it, and peace, and satisfaction of the accomplished round; for each day of the ship's life seems to close a circle within the wide ring of the sea horizon. It borrows a certain dignity of sameness from the majestic monotony of the sea. He who loves the sea loves also the ship's routine.
~ Joseph Conrad
This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak—the sea entering into the life of most men, and the men knowing something or everything about the sea, in the way of amusement, of travel, or of bread-winning.
~ Joseph Conrad
The calm was absolute, a dead, flat calm, the stillness of a dead sea and of a dead atmosphere.
~ Joseph Conrad
On men reprieved by its disdainful mercy, the immortal sea confers in its justice the full privilege of desired unrest.
~ Joseph Conrad
A Departure, the last professional sight of land, is always good, or at least good enough. For, even if the weather be thick, it does not matter much to a ship having all the open sea before her bows.
~ Joseph Conrad
and Kurtz's life was running swiftly, too, ebbing, ebbing out of his heart into the sea of inexorable time.
~ Joseph Conrad
There is such magnificent vagueness in the expectations that had driven each of us to sea, such a glorious indefiniteness, such a beautiful greed of adventures that are their own and only reward! What we get—well, we won't talk of that; but can one of us restrain a smile? In no other kind of life is the illusion more wide of reality—in no other is the beginning all illusion—the disenchantment more swift—the subjugation more complete.
~ Joseph Conrad
The solitude of the sea intensifies the thoughts and the facts of one's experience which seems to lie at the very centre of the world, as the ship which carries one always remains the centre figure of the round horizon.
~ Joseph Conrad
N-am smuls noi, oare, navigând laolalt? pe marea nemuritoare, un sens vieÈ›ilor noastre p?c?toase? Adio, fraÈ›ilor! AÈ›i fost niÈ™te mateloÈ›i destoinici. La fel de destoinici ca oricare dintre cei care-au izbit vreodat?, urlând, în pânzele zbuciumate ale arborelui mare; sau care, leg?nându-se pe vergi, invizibili în noapte, au r?spuns chiuind la chiotele furtunii.
~ Joseph Conrad
Between the five of us there was the strong bond of the sea, and also the fellowship of the craft, which no amount of enthusiasm for yatching, cruising, and so on can give, since one is only the amusement of life and the other is life itself.
~ Joseph Conrad
for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself...
~ Joseph Conrad
By all that's wonderful,it is the sea,I believe,the sea itself – or is it youth alone?Who can tell?But you here – you all had something out of life:money,love – whatever one gets on shore – and,tell me,wasn't that the best time,that time when we were young at sea;young and had nothing,on the sea that gives nothing,except hard knocks – and sometimes a chance to feel your strength – that only – what you all regret?
~ Joseph Conrad
The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist.
~ Joseph Conrad
He looked upon the immortal sea with the awakened and groping perception of its heartless might; he saw it unchanged, black and foaming under the eternal scrutiny of the stars; he heard its impatient voice calling for him out of a pitiless vastness full of unrest, turmoil, and of terror. He looked afar upon it, and he saw an immensity tortured and blind, moaning and furious, that claimed all the days of his tenacious life, and, when life was over, would claim the worn-out body of its slave...
~ Joseph Conrad
there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.
~ Joseph Conrad
One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.
~ Joseph Conrad
Love and regret go hand in hand in this world of changes swifter than the shifting of the clouds reflected in the mirror of the sea.
~ Joseph Conrad
He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them—the ship; and so is their country—the sea.
~ Joseph Conrad
a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land. And as I looked at the map of it in a shop-window, it fascinated me as a snake would a bird—a silly little bird.
~ Joseph Conrad
He knew the magic monotony of existence between sky and water: he had to bear the criticism of men, the exactions of the sea, and the prosaic severity of the daily task that gives bread1—but whose only reward is in the perfect love of the work.
~ Joseph Conrad