For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed for it,

for all the celebrations it has been the object of in prose and song,

the sea has never been friendly to man.

At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

Joseph Conrad

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.

I travel for travel's sake.

The great affair is to move.

Robert Louis Stevenson

A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.

Lao Tzu

Life hangs on a very thin thread and the cancer of time is complacency.

If you are going to do something, do it now. Tomorrow is too late.

Steve Goss

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land,

when they can see nothing but sea.

Francis Bacon

Times shall come in latter years when Ocean may loose the bonds of things,

and an enormous land become revealed; when Typhis may lay bare

new worlds, and Thule be no more the ultimate in lands.

L. Annæus Seneca

Medea

This prophecy was fulfilled by my father

Admiral Cristóbal Colón in the year 1492.

Don Fernando Colón

(Columbus’ illegitimate son by a peasant girl, Beatriz Enríquez de Arana)

I decided to write down everything that I might do and see and experience

on this voyage, from day to day, and very carefully.

Christopher Columbus

To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life,

must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest.

Otherwise you are doomed to a routine traverse,

the kind known to yachtsmen,

who play with their boats at sea --

"cruising," it is called.

Voyaging belongs to seamen,

and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in.

If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means,

abandon the venture until your fortunes change.

Only then will you know what the sea is all about.

"I've always wanted to sail to the South Seas, but I can't afford it."

What these men can't afford is not to go.

They are enmeshed in the cancerous discipline of "security."

And in the worship of security we fling our lives beneath the wheels of routine-

and before we know it our lives are gone.

Sterling Hayden

Been at sea all me bloomin' life.
I was born on the crest of a wave and rocked in the cradle of the deep.
A mermaid was me mother, King Neptune was me father.
Seaweed and barnacles be me clothes.
Every tooth in me head is a marlinspike, the hair on me head is Italian hemp.
Every bone in me body is a spar, and when I spits I spits Stockholm tar!
I'm hard, I is I am I are!

Author unknown

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines.

Sail away from the safe harbor.

Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Mark Twain

He who would keep himself busy let him equip these two;

a ship and a woman.

For no two  things involve more business once you start to fit them out,

nor are these two ever sufficiently adorned,

nor is any excess of adornment enough for them.

Plautus  200 BC

It is our duty to proceed from what is near to what is distant,

from what is known to what is less known,

to gather the traditions from those who have reported them

and to leave the rest as it is,

in order to make our work help anyone who seeks truth and loves wisdom.

Tahqiq ma lil-hind, Abu’l-Rayhan Muhammad al-Biruni, 973-1050

Voyaging beyond the horizon is a small vessel is

knowing removal from all the superflous vexations

and tribulations which have brought modern man to a platform

upon which he stands naked and alone in his secret terror,

not quite sure whether he is rich or poor,

or young or old, inspired or despairing,

or what his sale price will be

Ernest Gann, song of the sirens

Why am I doing this? Imagine yourself in the forest of the Amazon.

Suddenly you come upon a small temple of an ancient, lost civilization.

You are not simply going back and say,

"I have found a temple, a civilization no- body knows."

You are going to stay there, try to decipher it . . .

and then you discover that 100 kilometers on is another temple,

only the main temple.

Would you return?
Bernard Moitessier

Qe want to view the islands as the last bastion of paradise.

we want to leave our flawed worlds of responsibility and failed dreams

and walk a shore that we have not yet defiled.

the problem is, we carry our failed worlds with us. 

Fortunately, because we are loved by an incredible God

that defies our understanding,

we also carry the sands of paradise in our shoes.

We trod it everyday and fail to see where we walk.

Pati Brown

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.
Traditional song  

I shall go the way of the open sea,
To the lands I knew before you came,
And the cool ocean breezes shall blow from me
The memory of your name.
Laurence Hope

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