51+ Best Ocean Quotes: Exclusive Selection

The ocean is a symbol of formlessness, strength, calmness, mystery, hope and more. Inspirational ocean quotes will open your mind and heart to understand how ethereal and majestic the ocean is.

If you’re searching for famous nature quotes and cute stars quotes that perfectly capture what you’d like to say or just want to feel inspired yourself, browse through an amazing collection of sweet sunset quotes, best sunrise quotes and top hiking quotes.

Famous Ocean Quotes

I feel we are all islands in a common sea. Anne Morrow Lindbergh

There was a magic about the sea. People were drawn to it. People wanted to love by it, swim in it, play in it, look at it. It was a living thing that as as unpredictable as a great stage actor: it could be calm and welcoming, opening its arms to embrace it’s audience one moment, but then could explode with its stormy tempers, flinging people around, wanting them out, attacking coastlines, breaking down islands. It had a playful side too, as it enjoyed the crowd, tossed the children about, knocked lilos over, tipped over windsurfers, occasionally gave sailors helping hands; all done with a secret little chuckle. Cecelia Ahern

I wanted freedom, open air and adventure. I found it on the sea. Alain Gerbeault

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

The sea! the sea! the open sea! The blue, the fresh, the ever free! Bryan W. Procter

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

The sea is a desert of waves, a wilderness of water. Langston Hughes

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

You can never cross the ocean until you have courage to lose sight of the shore. Christopher ColumbusI thought of you and how you love this beauty. And walking up the long beach all alone. I heard the waves breaking in measured thunder. As you and I once heard their monotone. Around me were the echoing dunes, beyond me. The cold and sparkling silver of the sea. We two will pass through death and ages lengthen. Before you hear that sound again with me. Sarah Teasdale

Dance with the waves, move with the sea. Let the rhythm of the water set your soul free. Christy Ann Martine

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

Follow the river and you will find the sea. French Proverb

I want to learn how to speak to anyone at any time and make us both feel a little bit better, lighter, richer, with no commitments of ever meeting again. I want to learn how to stand wherever with whoever and still feel stable. I want to learn how to unlock the locks to our minds, my mind, so that when I hear opinions or views that don’t match up with mine, I can still listen and understand. I want to burn up lifeless habits of following maps and to do lists, concentrated liquids to burn my mind and throat and I want to go back to the way nature shaped me. I want to learn to go on well with whatever I have in my hands at the moment in a natural state of mind, certain like the sea. I will find comfort in the rhythm of the sea. Charlotte Eriksson

The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever. Jacques Yves Cousteau

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

A beach is not only a sweep of sand, but shells of sea creatures, the sea glass, the seaweed, the incongruous objects washed up by the ocean. Henry Grunwald

And I shall watch the ferry boats, and they’ll get high. On a bluer ocean against tomorrow’s sky. And I will never grow so old again, And I will walk and talk, in gardens all wet with rain. Van Morrison

Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Between shortage and absolute poverty an ocean of shades and gradations do emerge on the scale of deficiency. Be that as it may, each stage must find a mode to leave a door ajar for the sun to peer in and human warmth to radiate. Erik Pevernagie

The sea is an underwater museum still awaiting its visitors. Phillip Diole

Let this time in your life cut you open and drain all of the things that are holding you back. I’m going to help you forgive the things that you won’t let yourself forget. Jennifer Elisabeth

The world is a wide place where we stumble like children learning to walk. The world is a bright mosaic where we learn like children to see, where our little blurry eyes strive greedily to take in as much light and love and colour and detail as they can. The world is a coaxing whisper when the wind lips the trees, when the sea licks the shore, when animals burrow into earth and people look up at the sympathetic stars. The world is an admonishing roar when gales chase rain-clouds over the plains and whip up ocean waves, when people crowd into cities or intrude into dazzling jungles. What right have we to carry our desperate mouths up mountains or into deserts? Do we want to taste rock and sand or do we expect to make impossible poems from space and silence? The vastness at least reminds us how tiny we are, and how much we don’t yet understand. We are mere babes in the universe, all brothers and sisters in the nursery together. We had better learn to play nicely before we’re allowed out. And we want to go out, don’t we? Into the distant humming welcoming darkness. Jay Woodman

My soul is full of longing for the secret of the sea, and the heart of the great ocean sends a thrilling pulse through me. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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

You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water. Rabindranath Tagore

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

The sea appears all golden. Beneath the sun lit sky. Heinrich Heine

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

Is this chicken what I have, or is this fish? I know it’s tuna, but it says ‘Chicken of the Sea’. Jessica Simpson

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

The sea does not link to be restrained. Rick Riordan

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

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

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

To me, the sea is a continual miracle The fishes that swim the rocks the motion of the waves the ships, with men in them, What stranger miracles are there? Walt Whitman

The known is finite, the unknown infinite intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions. And even a cursory glance at the history of the biological sciences during the last quarter of a century is sufficient to justify the assertion, that the most potent instrument for the extension of the realm of natural knowledge which has come into men’s hands, since the publication of Newton’s Principia, is Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species. Thomas Henry Huxley

Would you learn the secret of the sea? Only those who brave its dangers, comprehend its mystery! Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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

That the sea is one of the most beautiful and magnificent sights in Nature, all admit. John Joly

They keep saying that sea levels are rising an’ all this. It’s nowt to do with the icebergs melting, it’s because there’s too many fish in it. Get rid of some of the fish and the water will drop. Simple. Basic science. Karl Pilkington

At night, when the sky is full of stars and the sea is still you get the wonderful sensation that you are floating in space. Natalie Wood

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

To me, the sea is like a person like a child that I’ve known a long time. It sounds crazy, I know, but when I swim in the sea I talk to it. I never feel alone when I’m out there. Gertrude Ederle

Wildflowers can’t be controlled, and neither can the girl with a soul boundless as the sky, and a spirit as free and wild as the ocean. Melody Lee

The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper I cannot quite make it out. Annie Dillard

Ocean had given me hope. He’d made me believe in people again. His sincerity had rubbed me raw, had peeled back the stubborn layers of anger I’d lived in for so long. Ocean made me want to give the world a second chance. Tahereh Mafi

The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea. Karen Blixen

He feels himself buried in those two infinities, the ocean and the sky, at one and the same time: the one is a tomb; the other is a shroud. Victor Hugo

The ocean is my happy place.