"My experience with engines is that if
you depend on them they fail you, but if it just doesn't matter, they serve
you."
-Frank Wightman
"He was now convinced that the most valuable sail
on board was the diesel."
-Ray Kauffman
"Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm."
-Syrus Pubilius
"It isn't that life ashore is distasteful to me.
But life at sea is better."
-Sir Francis Drake
"The art of the sailor is to leave nothing to chance."
-Annie Van De Wiele
"If you can't repair it, maybe it shouldn't be on
board."
-Lin and Larry Pardey
"Ships are the nearest thing to dreams that hands
have ever made."
-Robert N. Rose
"There is nothing- absolutely nothing-
half so much worth doing
as simply messing about in boats."
-Ratty said to Mole in Kenneth Grahame's beloved 1908
classic, The Wind in the Willows.
"The sail, the play of its pulse so like our own
lives: so thin and yet
so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and
impatient when least effective."
-Henry David Thoreau
"Land was created to provide a place for boats to
visit."
-Brooks Atkinson
"You're only as young as the last time you changed
your mind."
-Timothy Leary
"Only two sailors, in my experience, never ran aground.
One never left
port and the other was an atrocious liar."
-Don Bamford
"Out of sight of land the sailor feels safe. It
is the beach that
worries him."
-Charles G. Davis
"The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist
expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails."
-William A. Ward
"Ships that pass in the night and speak each other
in passing;
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and a silence."
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss!
Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies!"
Christopher Marlowe
"For me, my craft is sailing on,
Through mists to-day, clear seas anon.
Whate'er the final harbor be
'T is good to sail upon the sea!"
John Kendrick Bangs
"My soul to-day
Is far away
Sailing the Vesuvian Bay."
Thomas Buchanan Read
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