Sailing Quotes And Sayings – Some Funny, Some Inspirational

by allinspiration.com

“I can’t control the wind but I can adjust the sail.”
– Ricky Skaggs

“It is a ship with a great deal of sail but a very shallow keel.”
– Robert Bork

“Hoist up sail while gale doth last, Tide and wind stay no man’s pleasure.”
– Robert Southwell

“If, sir, men were all virtuous, I should with great alacrity teach them all to fly. But what would be the security of the good if the bad could at pleasure invade them from the sky? Against an army sailing through the clouds neither wall, nor mountains, nor seas could afford any security.”
– Samuel Johnson

“Water, water, everywhere, And all the boards did shrink. Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.”
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place, (Portentous sight!) the owlet Atheism, sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, drops his blue-fringed lids, and holds them close, and hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven, cries out, ‘Where is it?’”
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.”
– Seneca

“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

“There is a Japanese proverb that literally goes ‘Raise the sail with your stronger hand,’ meaning you must go after the opportunities that arise in life that you are best equipped to do.”
– Soichiro Honda

“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

“Wind is to us what money is to life on shore.”
– Sterling Hayden

“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

“I would never talk just to be social. Now, to sit down with a bunch of engineers and talk about the latest concrete forming systems, that’s really interesting. Talking with animal behaviorists or with someone who likes to sail, that’s interesting. Information is interesting to me. But talking for the sake of talking, I find that quite boring.”
– Temple Grandin

“Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.”
– Thomas B. Macaulay

“Never weather-beaten sail more willing bent to shore.”
– Thomas Campion

“What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.”
– Thomas Merton

“And soon, too soon, we part with pain, To sail o’er silent seas again.”
– Thomas Moore

“Once in a while you find yourself in an odd situation. You can get into it by degrees and in the most natural way but, when you are right in the midst of it, you are suddenly astonished and ask yourself how in the world it all came about.”
– Thor Heyerdahl

“Loki in ‘Thor’ is the most incredible springboard into a sort of excavation of the darker aspects of human nature. So that was thrilling, coming back knowing that I’d built the boat and now I could set sail into choppier waters.”
– Tom Hiddleston

“…now and then a giggling trail of mermaids appeared in our wake. We fed them oatmeal.”
– Tove Jansson

“We were born before the wind. Also younger than the sun. Ere the bonnie boat was won as we sailed into the mystic. Hark, now hear the sailors cry. Smell the sea and feel the sky. Let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic.”
– Van Morrison

“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

“No one is fit to judge a book until he has rounded Cape Horn in a sailing vessel, until he has bumped into two or three icebergs, until he has been lost in the sands of the desert, until he has spent a few years in the House of the Dead.”
– Van Wyck Brooks

“He enters the port with a full sail.”
– Virgil

“The white sail of his soul has rounded the promontory – death.”
– William Alexander

“The problem with some people is that when they aren’t drunk, they’re sober.”
– William Butler Yeats

“The effect of sailing is produced by a judicious arrangement of the sails to the direction of the wind.”
– William Falconer

“The fleet being thus more inclosed will more readily observe the signals, and with greater facility form itself into the line of battle a circumstance which should be kept in view in every order of sailing.”
– William Falconer

“To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.”
– William Osler

“Less judgment than wit is more sail than ballast.”
– William Penn

“The men nodded vigorously at me. When they took hold of me and lifted me in their strong arms, I thought nothing of it. I thought they were helping me. I was so full of trust in them that I felt grateful as they carried me in the air. Only when they threw me overboard did I begin to have doubts.”
– Yann Martel

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