Beautiful Quotes About the Sea from Books in the Sea Library

The sea .. washes away the stains and wounds of the world.

Oscar Wilde “De Profundis” 1905

The sea is as near as we come to another world.

Anne Stevenson “Poems 1955-2005” 2005

The sea, everywhere the sea, and no one looking at it.

Dany LaFerrière “Heading. South” 2009

The sea has neither meaning nor pity.

Anton Chekhov “Gusev” 1890

The sea
isn’t a place
but a fact, and
a mystery.

Mary Oliver “The Waves” 1986

I live; I die; the sea comes over me; it’s the blue that lasts.

Virginia Woolf “Melymbrosia” 1912

The sea remains the last place to which you can run away.

Horatio Clare “Icebreaker: A Voyage Far North” 2017

My imagination lives near the sea and under the sea.

Iris Murdoch “Crest of a Wave” Daily Mail, 23 Nov. 1978

events were the mere froth of things, and one’s true interest should be the sea

Chloe Aridjis “Sea Monsters” 2019

but I know that the sea comes before and after me

Albert Camus “The Sea Close By” 1967

The sea is everything .. it is the Living Infinite.

Jules Verne “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” 1870

There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath

Herman Melville “Moby-Dick; or, The Whale” 1851

If there were no oceans, would we have our souls?

Philip Hoare “RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR” 2017

If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.

Rachel Carson, National Book Award Acceptance Speech, 1952

The sea has many voices, Many gods and many voices.

T. S. Eliot “Four Quartets: The Dry Salvages” 1941

The Sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Standing looking out to sea can be a bit like standing at an altar. You wait in silence for some sort of benediction. If prayer could have a physical destination, this would be it: not the sky but the sea.

Jean Sprackland “Strands: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach” 2012

If timelessness exists anywhere on Earth, it is not in sight of the sea.

David Gange “The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey from Shetland to the Channel” 2019

I love the sea but the sea does not love me.

Tim Winton “Land’s Edge: A Coastal Memoir” 1993

Look at the sea. What does it care about offences?

James Joyce “Ulysses” 1922

The sea is the sea.

Ernest Hemingway “Selected Letters 1917-1961” 1981

All photos of the Baltic Sea by Beach Books.