I get it. I know you. I am like you. I LOVE the ocean. And I know you do, too. There is a certain kind of bliss we can only feel when we are near the sea. We love walking barefoot on the sand, letting the waves gently kiss our feet. The warmth on our back when the sun is high up is like fuel to our lungs. And we love our hair messy from the wind and salty from the water.
We never feel more alive when we are there. Right there, in the powerful presence of the sea. The ocean is like our mother, perpetually calling us home. You and I, we are the same. We are brothers and we are sisters. The sons and daughters of the ocean.
With summer being just right around the corner, I know you can’t wait to go. Soon, we’ll be there. Soon. So for now, I’ve collected some of my favorite quotes about the ocean, hoping that it will guide you home. Enjoy.
“I have been feeling very clearheaded lately and what I want to write about today is the sea. It contains so many colors. Silver at dawn, green at noon, dark blue in the evening. Sometimes it looks almost red. Or it will turn the color of old coins. Right now the shadows of clouds are dragging across it, and patches of sunlight are touching down everywhere. White strings of gulls drag over it like beads.
It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.”
― Anthony Doerr
“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
“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
“I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.”
― Anaïs Nin
“I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it’s because in addition to the fact that the sea changes, and the light changes, and ships change, it’s because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea – whether it is to sail or to watch it – we are going back from whence we came.”
― John F. Kennedy
“For whatever we lose (like a you or a me), It’s always our self we find in the sea.”
― e.e. Cummings
“In thinking about these deeper connections, I realized that water was the original shield that protected us from the outside world. Perhaps we all unconsciously seek this refuge again, and the warmth of summer, combined with the primal need to be sheltered, creates a feeling of comfort we can’t quite explain when we sit by, look at, or touch the water.
Whether from a sagging inflatable kiddie pool, a deserted swimming hole, a rocky Pacific beach, the shores of East Hampton, or a gushing city fire hydrant, we define our summers by the water we sit by. We smell it, taste it, love near it, write about it, and cast our gaze out past it. We make important decisions near it and also use it to forget, just for a time, those things we don’t want to think about anymore.”
— Joanne Dugan
“The cure for anything is salt water – sweat, tears, or the sea.”
― Isak Dinesen
Photo by Jean Roa
How about you? What is your favorite quote about the ocean?
Related reading: 10 Beautiful Travel Quotes to Spark Your Wanderlust This Year
