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C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Ocean

Old ocean’s gray and melancholy waste.

Bryant.

Neptune’s white herds lowing o’er the deep.

Ariosto.

How the waves of the sea kiss the shore!

Anacreon.

Wave rolling after wave in torrent rapture.

Milton.

The sea is flowing ever; the land retains it never.

Goethe.

Swelling in anger or sparkling in glee.

Bayard Taylor.

Ye who dwell at home, ye do not know the terrors of the main.

Southey.

Whilst breezy waves toss up their silvery spray.

Hood.

  • The free
  • Mighty, music-haunted sea.
  • Anna Katharine Green.

    The rolling billows beat the rugged shore, as they the earth would shoulder from her seat.

    Spenser.

  • The land is dearer for the sea,
  • The ocean for the shore.
  • Lucy Larcom.

    How the giant element from rock to rock leaps with delirious bound!

    Byron.

    Love the sea? I dote upon it—from the beach.

    Douglas Jerrold.

    I never was on the dull, tame shore, but I loved the great sea more and more.

    Barry Cornwall.

  • Ye waves
  • That o’er th’ interminable ocean wreathe
  • Your crisped smiles.
  • Æschylus.

  • Once more upon the waters! yet once more!
  • And the waves bound beneath me as a steed
  • That knows his rider.
  • Byron.

    The sea drowns out humanity and time. It has no sympathy with either, for it belongs to eternity; and of that it sings its monotonous song forever and ever.

    O. W. Holmes.

    While black with storms the ruffled ocean rolls, and from the fisher’s art defends her finny shoals.

    Sir R. Blackmore.

  • And evermore the waters worship God;—
  • And bards and prophets tune their mystic lyres
  • While listening to the music of the waves!
  • Mrs. Hale.

    Whosoever commands the sea, commands the trade; whosoever commands the trade of the world, commands the riches of the world, and consequently the world itself.

    Sir Walter Raleigh.

    Neptune has raised up his turbulent plains; the sea falls and leaps upon the trembling shore. She remounts, groans, and with redoubled blows makes the abyss and the shaken mountains resound.

    St. Lambert.

  • And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy
  • Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
  • Borne, like thy bubbles, onward; from a boy
  • I wanton’d with thy breakers.
  • Byron.

  • The pleased sea on a white-breasted shore—
  • A shore that wears on her alluring brows
  • Rare shells, far brought, the love-gifts of the sea,
  • That blushed a tell-tale.
  • Alexander Smith.

  • One height
  • Showed him the ocean, stretched in liquid light,
  • And he could hear its multitudinous roar,
  • Its plunge and hiss upon the pebbled shore.
  • George Eliot.

  • Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—roll!
  • Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
  • Man marks the earth with ruin—his control
  • Stops with the shore.
  • Byron.

  • The sea! the sea! the open sea!
  • The blue, the fresh, the ever free!
  • Without a mark, without a bound,
  • It runneth the earth’s wide regions round;
  • It plays with the clouds; it mocks the skies;
  • Or like a cradled creature lies.
  • Barry Cornwall.

    For now I stand as one upon a rock environed with a wilderness of sea, who marks the waxing tide grow wave by wave, expecting ever when some envious surge will in his brinish bowels swallow him.

    Shakespeare.

  • The image of Eternity—the throne
  • Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime
  • The monsters of the deep are made; each zone
  • Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.
  • Byron.

  • Behold the Sea,
  • The opaline, the plentiful and strong,
  • Yet beautiful as is the rose in June,
  • Fresh as the trickling rainbow of July;
  • Sea full of food, the nourisher of kinds,
  • Purger of earth, and medicine of men;
  • Creating a sweet climate by my breath,
  • Washing out harms and griefs from memory,
  • And, in my mathematic ebb and flow,
  • Giving a hint of that which changes not.
  • Emerson.