54 Ocean-Inspired Quotes

Escape into the mesmerizing world of the ocean with our carefully curated collection of the top 54 ocean-inspired quotes. Whether you're a lover of the deep blue sea or seeking a touch of aquatic inspiration, these poignant and evocative quotes will transport you to the waves, sands, and mysteries that lie beneath. Dive in and let the words of poets, adventurers, and sea-lovers alike wash over you, capturing the enchanting allure and timeless wisdom of the ocean. Get ready to be inspired, uplifted, and swept away by the beauty and depth of these oceanic musings.

1. “at the press conference for the film he impressed everyone with his complete sincerity and innocence. he said he had come to see the sea for the first time and marveled at how clean it was. someone told him that, in fact, it wasn't. 'when the world is emptied of human beings' he said, 'it will become so again” - Werner Herzog

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. “It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.” - Rachel Carson

4. “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

5. “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

6. “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

7. “I am a sailor, you're my first mate We signed on together, we coupled our fate Hauled up our anchor, determined not to fail For the heart's treasure, together we set sail With no maps to guide us, we steered our own course Rode out the storms when the winds were gale force Sat out the doldrums in patience and hope Working together, we learned how to cope. Life is an ocean and love it a boat In troubled waters it keeps us afloat When we started the voyage there was just me and you Now gathered round us we have our own crew Together we're in this relationship We built it with care to last the whole trip Our true destination's not marked on any chart We're navigating the shores of the heart” - John McDermott

8. “There's nothing wrong with enjoying looking at the surface of the ocean itself, except that when you finally see what goes on underwater,you realize that you've been missing the whole point of the ocean. Staying on the surface all the time is like going to the circus and staring at the outside of the tent.” - Dave Barry

9. “Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.” - Anne Carson

10. “The use of sea and air is common to all; neither can a title to the ocean belong to any people or private persons, forasmuch as neither nature nor public use and custom permit any possession therof.” - Queen Elizabeth I

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. “There were three things sought by invaders who crossed oceans to discover America. Those were gold, gospel, glory. There are four things sought by aliens who crossed heavens to discover planet earth. Those are gold, gospel, glory, gene.” - Toba Beta

13. “Darwin may have been quite correct in his theory that man descended from the apes of the forest, but surely woman rose from the frothy sea, as resplendent as Aphrodite on her scalloped chariot.” - Margot Datz

14. “The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.It is the night sea journey, the lone fisherman on a tropical sea with his nets, and you let these nets down - sometimes, something tears through them that leaves them in shreds and you just row for shore, and put your head under your bed and pray. At other times what slips through are the minutiae, the minnows of this ichthyological metaphor of idea chasing.But, sometimes, you can actually bring home something that is food, food for the human community that we can sustain ourselves on and go forward.” - Terence McKenna

15. “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

16. “I spent uncounted hours sitting at the bow looking at the water and the sky, studying each wave, different from the last, seeing how it caught the light, the air, the wind; watching patterns, the sweep of it all, and letting it take me. The sea.” - Gary Paulsen

17. “...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

18. “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

19. “Observou a doce ondulação das águas a rebentar na praia. Porque é que o mar sempre em movimento era tão calmante, tão infinitamente sedutor?” - Elizabeth Edmondson

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

21. “Screw sharks; a Transformer could be stretching up on its tippy toes and would still have a mile of cover to eat me.” - Emma McLaughlin & Nicola Draus

22. “The heroic and often tragic stories of American whalemen were renowned. They sailed the world’s oceans and brought back tales filled with bravery, perseverance, endurance, and survival. They mutinied, murdered, rioted, deserted, drank, sang, spun yarns, scrimshawed, and recorded their musings and observations in journals and letters. They survived boredom, backbreaking work, tempestuous seas, floggings, pirates, putrid food, and unimaginable cold. Enemies preyed on them in times of war, and competitors envied them in times of peace. Many whalemen died from violent encounters with whales and from terrible miscalculations about the unforgiving nature of nature itself. And through it all, whalemen, those “iron men in wooden boats” created a legacy of dramatic, poignant, and at times horrific stories that can still stir our emotions and animate the most primal part of our imaginations. “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme,” proclaimed Herman Melville, and the epic story of whaling is one of the mightiest themes in American history.” - Eric Jay Dolin

23. “Mr. Bird flung his food away and leaped to his feet, glaring around at no one in particular. 'I am not a dog!' he shouted agrily, his gold earrings flashing in the firelight.” - Tim Powers

24. “The children had had an argument once about whether there was more grass in the world or more sand, and Roger said that of course there must be more sand because of under the sea; in every ocean all over the world there would be sand, if you looked deep down. But there could be grass too, argued Deborah, a waving grass, a grass that nobody had ever seen, and the colour of that ocean grass would be darker than any grass on the surface of the world, in fields or prairies or people's gardens in America. It would be taller than tress and it would move like corn in the wind. ("The Pool” - Daphne du Maurier

25. “It was like trying to bail out an ocean of water with a teaspoon.” - Jodi Picoult

26. “She watched the gap between ship and shore grow to a huge gulf. Perhaps this was a little like dying, the departed no longer visible to the others, yet both still existed, only in different worlds.” - Susan Wiggs

27. “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

28. “‎I have always been fascinated by the ocean, to dip a limb beneath its surface and know that I'm touching eternity, that it goes on forever until it begins here again.” - Lauren DeStefano

29. “I couldn't imagine living in a state that didn't reach the ocean. It was a giant reset button. You could go to the edge of the land and see infinity and feel renewed.” - Avery Sawyer

30. “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

31. “When Rachel Carson accepted the National Book Award, she said, '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 poetry.” - Jim Lynch

32. “All matter, including you and I, has rhythmic movement within it and our quest should be to create a proper rhythmic harmony within ourselves…you feel happy when you sit near an ocean because your vibrations try to synchronize with the frequency of the waves.” - Ed Viswanathan

33. “Don’t you dare come into my world and tell me what color the ocean is! It’s black. Black as midnight. Black and awful!” - Nadia Scrieva

34. “I thought of you and how you love this beauty,And walking up the long beach all aloneI heard the waves breaking in measured thunderAs you and I once heard their monotone.Around me were the echoing dunes, beyond meThe cold and sparkling silver of the sea --We two will pass through death and ages lengthenBefore you hear that sound again with me.” - Sarah Teasdale

35. “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

36. “OvermodulationBy Charlotte M Liebel-FawlsYou're a cavity in my oasis,You're a porthole in my sea,You're a stretch of the imagination every time you look at me.You're an ocean in my wineglass,You're a Steinway on the beach,You're a captivating audience, an exciting Rembrandt,A Masterpiece.” - Charlotte M. Liebel

37. “It is almost startling to hear this warning of departed time sounding among the tombs, and telling the lapse of the hour, which, like a billow, has rolled us onward towards the grave.” - Washington Irving

38. “The sea answers all questions, and always in the same way; for when you read in the papers the interminable discussions and the bickering and the prognostications and the turmoil, the disagreements and the fateful decisions and agreements and the plans and the programs and the threats and the counter threats, then you close your eyes and the sea dispatches one more big roller in the unbroken line since the beginning of the world and it combs and breaks and returns foaming and saying: "So soon?" E. B. White "On A Florida Key” - E. B. White

39. “But in a way you can say that after leaving the sea, after all those millions of years of living inside of the sea, we took the ocean with us. When a woman makes a baby, she gives it water, inside her body, to grow in. That water inside her body is almost exactly the same as the water of the sea. It is salty, by just the same amount. She makes a little ocean, in her body. And not only this. Our blood and our sweating, they are both salty, almost exactly like the water from the sea is salty. We carry oceans inside of us, in our blood and our sweat. And we are crying the oceans, in our tears.” - Gregory David Roberts

40. “When I walk down the beach and smell the salt water, hear the waves crashing against the shoreline, and feel the granular sand under my feet, I can't help but realize why I'm here on this green earth” - Wendy Joubert

41. “Lex surfed wicked, like the devil. He wasn’t afraid of anything, seemed like. He grinned at West as the waves came up toward them like towers of green glass, an emerald city. We’re off to see the wizard, he shouted. He whooped. His body crouched ready to fly. He shone against the sun.” - Francesca Lia Block

42. “From the very beginningperplexing and wanderingfrom one ocean to anotheran everlasting wander” - Rixa White

43. “I like a good story and I also like staring at the sea-- do I have to choose between the two?” - David Byrne

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

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

46. “She remembers sprinting over the thin after-waves that slid over each other like sheets of glass. When she ran with the waves it looked like she wasn’t moving. When she ran against them it looked like she was flying. She refuses to believe her brother will never know these things. Somewhere, they will find sand.” - Isaac Marion

47. “Something, most certainly, happens to a diver’s emotions underwater. It is not merely a side effect of the pleasing, vaguely erotic sensation of water pressure on the body. Nor is it alone the peculiar sense of weightlessness, which permits a diver to hang motionless in open water, observing sea life large as whales around him; not the ability of a diver, descending in that condition, to slowly tumble and rotate in all three spatial planes. It is not the exhilaration from disorientation that comes when one’s point of view starts to lose its “lefts” and “down” and gains instead something else, a unique perception that grows out of the ease of movement in three dimensions. It is not from the diminishment of gravity to a force little more emphatic than a suggestion. It is not solely exposure to an unfamiliar intensity of life. It is not a state of rapture with the bottomless blue world beneath one’s feet…it is some complicated mix of these emotions, together with the constant proximity of real terror.” - Barry Lopez

48. “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

49. “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

50. “But it hadn't just been Sebastian who had been watching me. Rather, it had been tribes of merman and mermaids, who had been curious about this newcomer in town that could outswim any school of small fish.” - Keira D. Skye

51. “The plane banked, and he pressed his face against the cold window. The ocean tilted up to meet him, its dark surface studded with points of light that looked like constellations, fallen stars. The tourist sitting next to him asked him what they were. Nathan explained that the bright lights marked the boundaries of the ocean cemeteries. The lights that were fainter were memory buoys. They were the equivalent of tombstones on land: they marked the actual graves. While he was talking he noticed scratch-marks on the water, hundreds of white gashes, and suddenly the captain's voice, crackling over the intercom, interrupted him. The ships they could see on the right side of the aircraft were returning from a rehearsal for the service of remembrance that was held on the ocean every year. Towards the end of the week, in case they hadn't realised, a unique festival was due to take place in Moon Beach. It was known as the Day of the Dead......When he was young, it had been one of the days he most looked forward to. Yvonne would come and stay, and she'd always bring a fish with her, a huge fish freshly caught on the ocean, and she'd gut it on the kitchen table. Fish should be eaten, she'd said, because fish were the guardians of the soul, and she was so powerful in her belief that nobody dared to disagree. He remembered how the fish lay gaping on its bed of newspaper, the flesh dark-red and subtly ribbed where it was split in half, and Yvonne with her sleeves rolled back and her wrists dipped in blood that smelt of tin.It was a day that abounded in peculiar traditions. Pass any candy store in the city and there'd be marzipan skulls and sugar fish and little white chocolate bones for 5 cents each. Pass any bakery and you'd see cakes slathered in blue icing, cakes sprinkled with sea-salt.If you made a Day of the Dead cake at home you always hid a coin in it, and the person who found it was supposed to live forever. Once, when she was four, Georgia had swallowed the coin and almost choked. It was still one of her favourite stories about herself. In the afternoon, there'd be costume parties. You dressed up as Lazarus or Frankenstein, or you went as one of your dead relations. Or, if you couldn't think of anything else, you just wore something blue because that was the colour you went when you were buried at the bottom of the ocean. And everywhere there were bowls of candy and slices of special home-made Day of the Dead cake. Nobody's mother ever got it right. You always had to spit it out and shove it down the back of some chair. Later, when it grew dark, a fleet of ships would set sail for the ocean cemeteries, and the remembrance service would be held. Lying awake in his room, he'd imagine the boats rocking the the priest's voice pushed and pulled by the wind. And then, later still, after the boats had gone, the dead would rise from the ocean bed and walk on the water. They gathered the flowers that had been left as offerings, they blew the floating candles out. Smoke that smelt of churches poured from the wicks, drifted over the slowly heaving ocean, hid their feet. It was a night of strange occurrences. It was the night that everyone was Jesus......Thousands drove in for the celebrations. All Friday night the streets would be packed with people dressed head to toe in blue. Sometimes they painted their hands and faces too. Sometimes they dyed their hair. That was what you did in Moon Beach. Turned blue once a year. And then, sooner or later, you turned blue forever.” - Rupert Thomson

52. “Start with your heart, and only good can follow!” - Ocean

53. “I had come to learn pretty quickly that life has its highs and lows just like the ocean does and sometimes you just have to see how far they'll carry you.” - C.A. Williams

54. “If so, then it was also here where I came to know I can survive what hurts. I believed in my capacity to stand back up and run into the waves again and again, no matter the risk.” - Terry Tempest Williams