42 Inspiring Ocean Quotes

The ocean has long been a source of inspiration, mystery, and solace for humanity. Its vastness and unfathomable depths intrigue both the curious and the contemplative, offering a mirror to our own emotions and experiences. Exploring ocean quotes allows us to connect with the wisdom, beauty, and power of the sea through the words of sailors, poets, and thinkers who have been moved by its majesty. Whether you're seeking motivation, reflection, or simply a reminder of nature's grandeur, these 42 inspiring ocean quotes are sure to resonate with your soul, inviting you to dive deeper into the wonders of the ocean.

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

2. “We know only too well that what we are doing is nothing more than a drop in the ocean. But if the drop were not there, the ocean would be missing something.” - Mother Teresa

3. “I can wade Grief—Whole Pools of it—I'm used to that—But the least push of JoyBreaks up my feet—And I tip—drunken—Let no Pebble—smile—'Twas the New Liquor—That was all!” - Emily Dickinson

4. “Ocean, n. A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man — who has no gills.” - Ambrose Bierce

5. “She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar.” - Janet Fitch

6. “The sea is emotion incarnate. It loves, hates, and weeps. It defies all attempts to capture it with words and rejects all shackles. No matter what you say about it, there is always that which you can't.” - Christopher Paolini

7. “The deep roar of the ocean.The break of waves on farther shores that thought can find.The silent thunders of the deep.And from among it, voices calling, and yet not voices, humming trillings, wordlings, and half-articulated songs of thought.Greetings, waves of greetings, sliding back down into the inarticulate, words breaking together.A crash of sorrow on the shores of Earth.Waves of joy on--where? A world indescribably found, indescribably arrived at, indescribably wet, a song of water.A fugue of voices now, clamoring explanations, of a disaster unavertable, a world to be destroyed, a surge of helplessness, a spasm of despair, a dying fall, again the break of words.And then the fling of hope, the finding of a shadow Earth in the implications of enfolded time, submerged dimensions, the pull of parallels, the deep pull, the spin of will, the hurl and split of it, the fight. A new Earth pulled into replacement, the dolphins gone.Then stunningly a single voice, quite clear."This bowl was brought to you by the Campaign to Save the Humans. We bid you farewell."And then the sound of long, heavy, perfectly gray bodies rolling away into an unknown fathomless deep, quietly giggling.” - Douglas Adams

8. “I wish I could describe the feeling of being at sea, the anguish, frustration, and fear, the beauty that accompanies threatening spectacles, the spiritual communion with creatures in whose domain I sail. There is a magnificent intensity in life that comes when we are not in control but are only reacting, living, surviving. I am not a religious man per se. My own cosmology is convoluted and not in line with any particular church or philosphy. But for me, to go to sea is to glimpse the face of God. At sea i am reminded of my insignificance-- of all men's insignificance. It is a wonderful feeling to be so humbled.” - Steve Callahan

9. “Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form inself on the edge of consciousness.” - Raymond Chandler

10. “Unlike a fountain that circulates the same water in an enclosed, perpetually recycling system, a human being circulates thoughts in an unlimited reservoir of self.Don't limit yourself to being a mere fountain when you contain an ocean.” - Vera Nazarian

11. “Waves are the voices of tides. Tides are life," murmured Niko. "They bring new food for shore creatures, and take ships out to sea. They are the ocean's pulse, and our own heartbeat.” - Tamora Pierce

12. “I felt the full breadth and depth of the ocean around the sphere of the Earth, back billions of years to the beginning of life, across all the passing lives and deaths, the endless waves of swimming joy and quiet losses of exquisite creatures with fins and fronds, tentacles and wings, colourful and transparent, tiny and huge, coming and going. There is nothing the ocean has not seen” - Sally Andrew

13. “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

14. “Increasingly, we will be faced with a choice: whether to keep the oceans for wild fish or farmed fish. Farming domesticated species in close proximity with wild fish will mean that domesticated fish always win. Nobody in the world of policy appears to be asking what is best for society, wild fish or farmed fish. And what sort of farmed fish, anyway? Were this question to be asked, and answered honestly, we might find that our interests lay in prioritizing wild fish and making their ecosystems more productive by leaving them alone enough of the time.” - Charles Clover

15. “The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities... If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.” - Rachel Carson

16. “to split the very sea into ours and theirs." Border at the BeachAnd More White Sheets” - Eileen Clemens Granfors

17. “Shearwater sighed, like a whale in the night.” - Aldous Huxley

18. “We all have an edge. We all are floating our psyche on top with a great ocean underneath.” - Brad Dourif

19. “Shandy looked ahead. Blackbeard, apparently willing to get the explanation later, had picked up his oars and was rowing again. 'May I presume to suggest,' yelled Shandy giddily to Davies, 'that we preoceed the hell out of here with all due haste.' Davies pushed a stray lock of hair back from his forehead and sat down on the rower's thwart. 'My dear fellow consider it done.” - Tim Powers

20. “Things are never as they seem. A person. A Mark. A statement. They are always deeper than we perceive, like walking in the ocean and suddenly dipping under the surface because the bottom has disappeared beneath your feet. The water appears shallow until you are suddenly flailing around beneath the surface, desperately searching for stable ground once again.” - Kelseyleigh Reber

21. “I'm always happy when I'm surrounded by water, I think I'm a Mermaid or I was a mermaid.The ocean makes me feel really small and it makes me put my whole life into perspective… it humbles you and makes you feel almost like you’ve been baptized. I feel born again when I get out of the ocean.” - Beyoncé Knowles

22. “My room was in one of those turrets and at night I could hear the sea and the faint rustle of eelgrass in the soft wind. The weather was perfect that summer. No storms. Blue skies and just the right amount of wind every day. The sailors were in heaven.” - Katherine Hall Page

23. “Your heart is like the ocean, mysterious and dark.” - Bob Dylan

24. “…have poets write about you as if you are alive. Scientifically, it is absolutely true, you are alive. You have a pulse, the waves, and a metabolism, the food chain. A personality, a character, a consciousness, and a sense of purpose…try this- turn into spray, spin rainbows…wear down entire mountains and dump them in layers…gently surround marina sea grass twice a day, protecting and feeding thousands of crabs, ducks, and geese…fill human eyes with warm salt brine at least once a month… Becoming Water” - Susan Zwinger

25. “all my life i have lived and behaved very much like the sandpiper just running down the edges of different countries and continents, looking for something.” - Elizabeth Bishop

26. “In school I ended up writing three different papers on "The Castaway" section of Moby-Dick, the chapter where the cabin boy Pip falls overboard and is driven mad by the empty immensity of what he finds himself floating in. And when I teach school now I always teach Crane's horrific "The Open Boat," and get all bent out of shape when the kids find the story dull or jaunty-adventurish: I want them to feel the same marrow-level dread of the oceanic I've always felt, the intuition of the sea as primordial nada, bottomless, depths inhabited by cackling tooth-studded things rising toward you at the rate a feather falls.” - David Foster Wallace

27. “Whenever I look at the ocean, I always want to talk to people, but when I'm talking to people, I always want to look at the ocean.” - Haruki Murakami

28. “I could be blindfolded and dropped into the deepest ocean and I would know where to find you. I could be buried a hundred miles underground and I would know where you are.” - Neil Gaiman

29. “It is beautiful, it is endless, it is full and yet seems empty. It hurts us.” - Jackson Pearce

30. “The world is a navy in an empty ocean.” - Dejan Stojanovic

31. “I am the shore and the ocean, awaiting myself on both sides.” - Dejan Stojanovic

32. “A broken heart, too much cold beer, ocean waves and a willing man were never a good combination, no matter what the country songs said.” - Patti Callahan Henry

33. “I wonder if the ocean smells different on the other side of the world.” - J.A. Redmerski

34. “My love for you reaches beyond the borders of continents, so vast in scope that I would cross oceans to be with you.Yes, but does that same love penetrate so deep as to dare thee to sink to the oceans' depths to find me?"-from "My Aquarius” - Richelle E. Goodrich

35. “Tell me once more about the eternal surf.” - Rob Bignell

36. “He talks softly, patiently, as I sit on the window ledge and watch boats with colorful triangles for sails scratch the ocean.” - Lauren DeStefano

37. “I was always an unusual girl.My mother told me I had a chameleon soul, no moral compass pointing due north, no fixed personality; just an inner indecisiveness that was as wide and as wavering as the ocean.” - Lana Del Rey

38. “I watched the enormity of the clouds for several minutes. What I wanted to experience in the water, I realized, was how life of the reef was layered and intertwined. I now had many individual pieces at hand: named images, nouns. How were they related? What were the verbs? Which syntaxes were indigenous to the place? I asked a dozen knowledgeable people. No one was inclined to elaborate- or they didn’t know. “Did you see the octopus?” Someone shouted after the dive. Yes, I thought, but who among us knows what it was doing? What else was THERE, just then? WHY?” - Barry Lopez

39. “The ocean was one of the greatest things he had ever seen in his life—bigger and deeper than anything he had imagined. It changed its color and shape and expression according to time and place and weather. It aroused a deep sadness in his heart, and at the same time it brought his heart peace and comfort.” - Haruki Murakami

40. “Meditation expands our inner being. The inner being is like a small, individual river flowering towards the Ocean. In meditation, I feel how my inner being expands into an inner ocean, which is part of everything, which is one with Existence. Through the inner being, we come in contact with the inner ocean, the undefined and boundless within ourselves, where we are one with life. We realize that God is part of life. We realize that God is not a person, but the consciousness that is part of everything. We find God in a flower, in a tree, in the eyes of a child or in a playful dog. Through discovering our inner being, we discover that we are also part of the flower, the child or the dog. We realize that God is everywhere.” - Swami Dhyan Giten

41. “AimlesslyIt pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. NoOne listens to poetry.— from "Thing Language” - Jack Spicer

42. “Most people new to a city on the ocean would probably go to the beach during the day when there are people around. I, on the other hand, decided to try a midnight swim at the somewhat gamy Santa Monica pier, by myself. That is, until a nearby guard kicked me off the beach for my own safety.” - Kathy Griffin