The sea is feline. It licks your feet.
-- Oliver Wendall Holmes, SR.,The Professor at the Breakfast-Table, 1860.

The seas are the heart's blood of the earth.
-- Henry Beston, The Headlong Wave in The Outermost House, 1928.

What fairy-like music steals over the sea,
Entrancing our senses with charmed melody?
-- Mrs. C. B. Wilson, What Fairy-like Music.

A life on the ocean wave!
A home on the rolling deep,
Where the scattered waters rave,
And the winds their revels keep!
-- Epes Sargent, Life on the Ocean Wave.

The sea, washing the equator and the poles, offers its perilous aid, and the power and empire that follow it. . . . "Beware of me," it says, "but if you can hold me, I am the key to all the lands."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life, Wealth, 1860

What are the wild waves saying,
Sister, the whole day long,
That ever amid our playing
I hear but their low, lone song?
-- Joseph E. Carpenter, What are the Wild Waves Saying?

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, Remarks, New York Post, 5 Sept. 1956

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
It's always ourself we find in the sea.
-- E. E. Cummings, maggie and millie and mollie and may in 95 Poems, 1958.

The Mediterranean has the color of mackerel, changeable I mean. You don't always know if it is green or violet, you can't even say it's blue, because the next moment the changing reflection has taken on a tint of rose or gray.
-- Vincent Van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, 1927

I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it roaring and raging like a wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free, and ending just where it began.
-- William Hazlitt, Common Places, Literary Examiner, 8 November 1823

The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
-- Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea, 1906

The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude, Civilization, 1870

For all at last return to the sea - to Oceanus, the ocean river, like the ever-flowing stream of time, the beginning and the end.
-- Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us, 1950.

Come o'er the moonlit sea,
The waves are brightly glowing.
-- Charles Jefferys

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

We are as near to heaven by sea as by land.
-- Sir Humphrey Gilbert, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffics and Discoveries of the English Nation by Richard Hakluyt, 1600

I 'm on the sea! I 'm on the sea!
I am where I would ever be,
With the blue above and the blue below,
And silence wheresoe'er I go.
-- Bryan W. Procter

I never was on the dull, tame shore,
But I loved the great sea more and more.
-- Bryan W. Procter

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
-- T.S. Eliot, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.
-- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, 1900

When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.
-- Samuel Johnson, Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell, 1797