'
A man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company'
- Samuel Johnson, referring to life aboard

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

If you haven't gone aground, you haven't gone anywhere. - John J. Kettlewell

The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation- J. Conrad

"Ships are all right, it's the men in them..."
- Old adage

"Below 50 degrees south there is no law.  Below 60 degrees south there is no God".
-Old Sailors Adage

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

"It's scary to have a 30 foot wave chasing you. If you are steering, you don't look back. The crew looks back for you, and you watch their faces. When they look straight up, then get ready!"
-Magnus Olsson

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

"I don't know who named them swells. There's nothing swell about them. They should have named them awfuls".
-Hugo Vihlen

"It's remarkable how quickly a good and favorable wind can sweep away the maddening frustrations of shore living".
-Ernest K. Gann

"Boats, like whiskey, are all good".
-R.D. (Pete) Culler

"A ship is always referred to as "she" because it costs so much to keep her in paint and powder".
-ADM. Chester Nimitz

"It looks like frozen snot".
-L. Francis Herreshoff, looking at a Herreshoff Bullseye built of fiberglass.

"If a man is to be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most".
-E. B. White

"You have no right to own a yacht if you ask that question".
-J. P. Morgan Sr., in answer to a question by Henry Clay Pierce on how much it costs to own and run a yacht.

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

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

"The cabin of a small yacht is truly a wonderful thing;  not only will it shelter you from a tempest, but from the other troubles in life, it is a safe retreat."
-L. Francist Herreshoff

"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

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

"The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor".
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

"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 while loading his boat with gin.

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

"The only way to get a good crew is to marry one".
-Eric Hiscock

"A sailing ship is no democracy; you don't caucus a crew as to where you'll go anymore than you inquire when they'd like to shorten sail."
-Sterling Hayden

"I know who you are, but you'll have to wipe your feet".
-Capt. Richard Brown of the schooner America to Prince Albert of England, 1851

"Only two sailors, in my experience, never ran aground. One never left port and the other was an atrocious liar."
-Don Bamford

"We had twelve hours of daylight, and if we did not sight the coast, I should conclude that Brazil was merely a geographical expression."
-Frank Wightman

"The sea hates a coward".
-Eugene O'Neill

"The ocean is an object of no small terror".
-Edmund Burke

"The sea drives truth into a man like salt".
-Hilaire Belloc

"Waves are not measured in feet or inches, they are measured in increments of fear".
-Buzzy Trent

"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 aquires on land".
-Jimmy Buffett

"To be successful at sea we must keep things simple".
-R. D. (Pete) Culler

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

"The thing I realized this last few days is that the earth is a big place".
-Paul Cayard

"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

"Our voyage hade commenced, and at last we were away, gliding through the clean water, past the reeds. Care was lifted from our shoulders, for we were free from advice, pessimism, officialism, heat and hot air.
-K. Adlard Coles

"The single commandment of anchoring is "thou shall create scope".
-Reese Palley

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

"I can't wait for the oil wells to run dry, for the last gob of black, sticky muck to come oozing out of some remote well. Then the glory of sail will return."
-Triston Jones

"Headwinds are sore vexations and the more passengers the sorer."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Confronting a storm is like fighting God. All the powers in the universe seem to be against you and, in an exraordinary way, your irrelevance is at the same time both humbling and exalting".
-Franciose LeGrande

"I once knew a writer who, after saying beautiful things about the sea, passed through a Pacific hurricane, and he became a changed man".
-Joshua Slocum

"The pleasures of being becalmed became threadbare; there is a limit to untutored star gazing".
-Charles Landery

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

"There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes".
-Old Norwegian Adage

"I loved cruising the coast of Maine. For one thing, it helped me conquer my fear of fog. Not that I have learned to feel secure in the fog, but at least I have learned how to grope without panic".
-Herb Payson

"At last, the god-damned engine is quiet!"
-William Snaith

"He was now convinced that the most valuable sail on board was the diesel".
-Ray Kauffman

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

"There is nothing so distressing as running ashore, unless there is also
doubt as to which continent the shore belongs."   STS Lecky

She breathes sturdy eager confidence, a living embodiment of the truth that the sea is for sailing, that strenuousness is the immortal path and sloth the way of death"! - HW Tilman

"Nothing goes to windward like a 747"
Tracy Ross

"Never test the depth of the water with both feet."

"Land was created to provide a place for boats to visit".
-Brooks Atkinson

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

Money can't buy you happiness. But it can buy you a yacht big enough to pull up right alongside it

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

"Sailing is a good sport.  You don't have to beat up the other guy like you do in boxing and football; you just try to outsmart him, and then you go out and have a beer with him"
-John Kolius

"Only two sailors, in my experience, never ran aground. One never left port and the other was an atrocious liar."
-Don Bamford

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
Melville

Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.
 Melville

. . . there is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.
Conrad

I would not creep along the coast but steer
Out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars.
TS Eliot

Praise the Sea, but keepe on land.      
G Herbert

Tut! the best thing I know between France and England is the sea.
Jerrold

It is a pleasure for to sit at ease
  Upon the land, and safely for to see
    How other folks are tossed on the seas
      That with the blustering winds turmoiled be.
      Lucritius

Love the shore; let others keep to the deep sea.
  [Lat., Littus ama; altum alii teneant.]
      Virgil

The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness. Joseph Conrad

The sea has neither meaning nor pity. Anton Chekhov

There is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.
        - Water Rat, Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it - but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.
        - Oliver Wendel Holmes

There isn't no call to go talking of pushing and pulling. Boats are quite tricky enough for those that sit still without looking further for the cause of trouble.
        - Sam Gamgee, J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

For whatever we lose, ( Like a you or a me), It's always ourselves we find in the sea".
-E.E. Cummings

"The chance of mistakes are about equal to the number of crew squared"
Ted Turner

"We don't just want the Cup, we want the whole damn island!"
-Tom Blackaller, on retreiving the Americas Cup from Australia

"Sailboat racing becomes a game of chance only when you are not prepared".
-Buddy Melges

"Protesting the New York Yacht Club is like complaining about your wife to your mother in law"
-Capt. Angus Walters.

"We won the race by twenty three seconds, and two seconds after we had crossed the line, the mast snapped.  Which solved the problem of stopping anyway".
-Philip Holland

"The Americas Cup is a race of management, money, technology, teamwork and, last and incidently, sailing."
-Bill Kock

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

"The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails".  (this is one of my personal favorites)
-William Arthur Ward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"To young men contemplating a voyage I'd say go."
-Joshua Slocum

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

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

"Only fools and passengers drink at sea".
-Allan Villiers

"Out of sight of land the sailor feels safe.  It is the beach that worries him".
-Charles C. Davis

"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 yachts beauty is that nothing should be there for only beauty's sake".
-John MacGregor

"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

"There is but a plank between a sailor and eternity".
-Thomas Gibbons

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

"Long ocean passages usually don't require engines; it's the ports and headlands at each end that may demand some expert sailing".
-Hal Roth

Proverb
A sure cure for seasickness is to sit under a tree