Your Favorite Boat, Cruising, Nautical Quotes

[Richard]

For years I have collected quotes about boats, cruising, the sea, etc. and this morning, lying in my hammock (unfortunately NOT on a boat) I was reading through some of them on an old notebook computer I don't use very often and came across pages of quotes. I can't believe I'm the only person here that does that sort of thing. I thought I might share a couple of them to start off this thread and hope others will share their's as well:

The difference between a house and a boat according to Arthur Ransom:

Houses are but badly built boats so firmly aground that you can not think
of moving them. They are definitely inferior things, belonging to the
vegetable, not the animal world, rooted and stationary, incapable of gay
transition.... The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man
content thenceforward with a single anchorage. The desire to build a boat
is the desire of youth, unwilling yet to accept the idea of a final resting
place.

One of the best temporary cures for pride and affectation is seasickness; a man who wants to vomit never puts on airs.---Henry Wheeler Snow

"One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold, sunless shore and said, 'We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I'll make one. I'll make a voice like all of time and all the fog that ever was; I'll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard cold shore. I'll make a sound that's so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their soul, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in distant towns. I'll make me a sound and an apparatus and they'll call it a foghorn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life.'---Ray Bradbury

And the bright horizon calls! Many a thing will keep till the world's work is done, and youth is only a memory. When the old enchanter came to my door laden with dreams, I reached out with both hands. For I knew that he would not be lured with the gold that I might later offer, when age had come upon me.--- Richard MacCullough/Viking's Wake

I'll have a lot more, but now it's over to y'all.

[Richard]

No doubt a fair amount of climbing up iron ladders can be achieved by an active man in a ship's engine room, but I remember moments when even to my supple limbs and pride of nimbleness the sailing ship's machinery seemed to reach up to the very stars.

For machinery it is, doing its work in perfect silence and with a motionless grace, that seems to hide a capricious and not always governable power, taking nothing away from the material stores of the earth. Not for it the unerring precision of steel moved by white steam and living by red fire and fed with black coal. The other seems to draw its strength from the very soul of the world, its formidable ally, held to obedience by the frailest bonds, like a fierce ghost captured in a snare of something even finer than spun silk. For what is the array of the strongest ropes, the tallest spars and the stoutest canvas against the mighty breath of the Infinite, but thistle stalks, cobwebs, and gossamer? - - Joseph Conrad/Mirror of the Sea

[Banana Wind]

I rather like the short & sweet - yet profund ones ....here's one to kick things off .......

“Ideals are like the stars: we never reach them, but like the mariners of the sea, we chart our course by them.” -----Carl Schurz

[___/)ances With Sails]

Mr. Bruce Chatwin reminds us that "Man's real home is not a house, but the road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot."

"Whether the weather be fine, or whether the weather be not...we'll weather the weather, whatever the weather, whether we like it or not."
~British School Rhyme

[Mike]

Anything's gonna happen,
it's gonna happen out there. – Captain Ron

The best cure for sea-sickness; Go sit under a tree. -- unknown

[Richard]

Thanks for the contributions, guys

[Richard]

Regarding why so many people who dream about going cruising don't actually go:

“If we’re really going to start a new life, we have to kill the old one. That’s why most people never really start anything new. They’re claimed by old lamps and bureaus left to them by their grandmothers." - - Betty Wilson-Away from it All

And Henry David Thoreau put it this way:

"I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of."

[Wendy, Matt & Nemo]

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

Mark Twain

[Wendy, Matt & Nemo]

You want to be happy? Then find the wind, find where it’s coming from and where it’s going. For it is only when your boat has a bellyful of wind in her sails and her hull is ripping through the sea, and the salt spray is stinging your face, that you will know you’re alive. You will know who you are and where you’re going. You will know your dream.

[Wendy, Matt & Nemo]

"Being hove to in a long gale is the most boring way of being terrified I know." -Donald Hamilton
"I don't know who named them swells. There's nothing swell about them. They should have named them awfuls." -Hugo Vihlen
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.
Only two sailors, in my experience, never ran aground. One never left port and the other was an atrocious liar." -Don Bamford
Waves are not measured in feet or inches, they are measured in increments of fear." -Buzzy Trent

[CAN DRAC]

These are great! I'm going to make a t-shirt with Chichester's :-)

[___/)ances With Sails]

Ditto!

Here's your first order! Make mine a red large-medium tank top. 'Drunken Sailor' over the left chest and 'the quote' on the back.
Thanks. send the bill with my order please (I'll give ye my address when I know your serious)


___/)

[Kevin M. Morton]

I like these:

Never approach a dock faster than you are willing to hit it.

If you are easily embarrassed, then sailing is not for you.

If you are about to slam into the dock, don't run your engine in full reverse. You will still hit the dock, but now everyone will be watching.

Want to see a bunch of angry powerboaters at a launch ramp? Bring a sailboat.