Boating Quotes

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Boating Quotes

Boating Quotes

Ships are the nearest things 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.
- Kenneth Grahame

Boats, like whiskey, are all good.
- Culler

A lot of people ask me if I were shipwrecked, and could only have one book, what would it be? I always say 'How to Build a Boat
- Stephen Wright

I want a boat that drinks 6, eats 4, and sleeps 2.
- Earnest K. Gann

The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.
- William A. Ward

At sea, I learned how little a person needs, not how much.
- Robin Lee Graham

Twenty years from now you will be more disppointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
- Mark Twain

I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky.
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.
- John Masefield

"The ocean has always been a salve to my soul...the best thing for a cut or abrasion was to go swimming in salt water. Later down the road of life, I made the discovery that salt water was also good for the mental abrasions one inevitably acquires on land."
- Jimmy Buffett

"The sea is the same as it has been since before men ever went on it in boats."
- Ernest Hemingway

The lovely thing about cruising is that planning usually turns out to be of little use.
- Dom Degnon

There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.
- Joseph Conrad

"Never a ship sails out of a bay, but carries my heart as a stowaway."
- Roselle Mercier Montgomery

"Cruising has two pleasures. One is to go out in wider waters from a sheltered place. The other is to go into a sheltered place from wider waters."
- Howard Bloomfield

Mackerel skies and mares tails, soon will be time to shorten sails.
- Old sailors proverb.

There is nothing like lying flat on your back on the deck, alone except for the helmsman aft at the wheel, silence except for the lapping of the sea against the side of the ship. At that time you can be equal to Ulysses and brother to him.
- Errol Flynn

"One of the best temporary cures for pride and affection is seasickness."
- Henry Wheeler Show

Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Give him a fishing lesson and he'll sit in a boat drinking beer every weekend.
- Alex Blackwell

A sailor’s joys are as simple as a child’s.
- Bernard Moitessier

The days pass happily with me wherever my ship sails.
- Joshua Slocum

"The sea finds out everything you did wrong."
- Francis Stokes

“I start from the premise that no object created by man is as satisfying to his body and soul as a proper sailing yacht.”
- Arthur Beiser (The Proper Yacht)

"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

"Not all who wander are lost."
- JRR Tolkien

There are three sorts of people; those who are alive, those who are dead, and those who are at sea.
- Old Capstan Chantey attributed to Anacharsis, 6th Century BC

The cure for anything is saltwater – sweat, tears, or the sea.
- Isak Dinesen

The sea hates a coward.
- Eugene O’Neill

To young men contemplating a voyage I would say go.
- Joshua Slocum

Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.
- H. Melville (Moby Dick)

A tourist remains an outsider throughout his visit; but a sailor is part of the local scene from the monent he arrives.
- Anne Davison

"The only reason that Uldra's engine never failed was because she did not have one."
- Dennis Puleston

"Men in a ship are always looking up, and men ashore are usually looking down."
- John Masefield

"A small craft in an ocean is, or should be, a benevolent dictatorship."
- Tristan Jones

Any fool can carry on, but a wise man knows how to shorten sail in time.
- Joseph Conrad

My Mom said she learned how to swim when someone took her out in the lake and threw her off the boat. I said, “Mom, they weren't trying to teach you how to swim."
-Paula Poundstone

"It isn't that life ashore is distasteful to me. But life at sea is better."
- Sir Francis Drake

"He who lets the sea lull him into a sense of security is in very grave danger."
-Hammond Ines

"It's out there at sea that you are really yourself."
-Vito Dumas

The art of the sailor is to leave nothing to chance.
- Annie Van De Wiele

"Any damn fool can navigate the world sober. It takes a really good sailor to do it drunk."
- Sir Francis Chichester

"Whenever your preparations for the sea are poor; the sea worms its way in and finds the problems."
- Francis Stokes

When a man comes to like a sea life, he is not fit to live on land.
- Dr. Samuel Johnson

Bad cooking is responsible for more trouble at sea than all other things put together.
- Thomas Fleming Day

"To the question, "When were your spirits at the lowest ebb?" the obvious answer seemed to be, "When the gin gave out."
- Sir Francis Chichester

"The art of the sailor is to leave nothing to chance."
- Annie Van De Wiele

Being hove to in a long gale is the most boring way of being terrified I know.
- Donald Hamilton

He that will not sail till all dangers are over must never put to sea.
- Thomas Fuller

Off Cape Horn there are but two kinds of weather, neither one of them a pleasant kind.
- John Masefield

A sailor is an artist whose medium is the wind.
- Webb Chiles

"There are only two colors to paint a boat, black or white, and only a fool would paint a boat black."
- Nathanael G. Herreshoff

"For one thing, I was no longer alone; a man is never alone with the wind-and the boat made three."
- Hilaire Belloc

"If you can not arrive in daylight, then stand off well clear, and wait until dawn. After all, that's one of the things God made boats for- to wait in."
- Tristan Jones

"Sailors, with their built in sense of order, service and discipline, should really be running the world."

- Nicholas Monsarrat

"Without patience, a sailor I would never be."
-Lee Allred

The wind and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigator.
- Edmund Gibbon

The chance for mistakes is about equal to the number of crew squared.
- Ted Turner

"I was born in the breezes, and I had studied the sea as perhaps few men have studied it, neglecting all else."
- Joshua Slocum

"When I forget how talented God is, I look to the sea."
-Whoopi Goldberg

"If you can't repair it, maybe it shouldn't be on board."
- Lin and Larry Pardey

Jolly boating weather,
And a hay harvest breeze,
Blade on the feather,
Shade off the trees.
-William Johnson Cory

"There is little man has made that approaches anything in nature, but a sailing ship does. There is not much man has made that calls to all the best in him, but a sailing ship does."
- Allan Villiers

"The perfection of a yacht's beauty is that nothing should be there for only beauty's sake."
- John MacGregor

"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 goal is not to sail the boat, but rather to help the boat sail herself.
- John Rousmaniere

Prevention is, as in other aspects of seamanship, better than cure.
- Sir Robin Knox-Johnston

Wind is to us what money is to life on shore.
- Sterling Hayden

I hate storms, but calms undermine my spirits.
- Bernard Moitessier

"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

“Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks”
- Warren Buffett

"Ships are the nearest thing to dreams that hands have ever made."
- Robert N. Rose

"Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm."
-Syrus Pubilius

The water is the same on both sides of the boat.
-Finnish Proverb

“The person who goes farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare. The sure-thing boat never gets far from shore.”
- Dale Carnegie

“Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.”
- Jean-Paul Sartre

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