Quotes4study

If the true spark of religious and civil liberty be kindled, it will burn. Human agency cannot extinguish it. Like the earth's central fire, it may be smothered for a time; the ocean may overwhelm it; mountains may press it down; but its inherent and unconquerable force will heave both the ocean and the land, and at some time or another, in some place or another, the volcano will break out and flame to heaven.--_Daniel Webster._

Maturin M. Ballou     Pearls of Thought

Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York, And all the clouds that loured upon our house In the deep bosom of the ocean buried. Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths, Our bruised arms hung up for monuments, Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings, Our dreadful marches to delightful measures. Grim-visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front; And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds To fright the souls of fearful adversaries, He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber To the lascivious pleasing of a lute. But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass; I, that am rudely stamped, and want love's majesty To strut before a wanton ambling nymph; I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion, Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time Into this breathing world, scarce half made up, And that so lamely and unfashionable That dogs bark at me as I halt by them,-- Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace, Have no delight to pass away the time, Unless to spy my shadow in the sun.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 1564-1616.     _King Richard III. Act i. Sc. 1._

Sink the Bible to the bottom of the ocean, and man's obligations to God would be unchanged. He would have the same path to tread, only his lamp and his guide would be gone; he would have the same voyage to make, only his compass and chart would be overboard.

_Ward Beecher._

My heart resembles the ocean; has storm, and ebb, and flow; / And many a beautiful pearl / Lies hid in its depths below.

_Heine._

Les vertus se perdent dans l'interet comme les fleuves se perdent dans la mer=--Our virtues lose themselves in our interests, as the rivers lose themselves in the ocean.

La Rochefoucauld.

Some men of a secluded and studious life have sent forth from their closet or their cloister, rays of intellectual light that have agitated courts and revolutionized kingdoms; like the moon which, though far removed from the ocean, and shining upon it with a serene and sober light, is the chief cause of all those ebbings and flowings which incessantly disturb that restless world of waters.--_Colton._

Maturin M. Ballou     Pearls of Thought

Come to the bridal chamber, Death, Come to the mother's, when she feels, For the first time, her first born's breath; Come, when the blessed seals That close the pestilence are broke, And crowded cities wail its stroke: Come in consumption's ghastly form, The earthquake shock, the ocean storm; Come when the heart beats high and warm With banquet song and dance and wine; And thou art terrible: — the tear, The groan, the knell, the pall, the bier, And all we know, or dream, or fear, Of agony, are thine. But to the hero, when his sword Has won the battle for the free, Thy voice sounds like a prophet's word, And in its hollow tones are heard The thanks of millions yet to be.

Fitz-Greene Halleck

Always driven towards new shores, or carried hence without hope of return, shall we never, on the ocean of age cast anchor for even a day?--_Lamartine._

Maturin M. Ballou     Pearls of Thought

ii. p. 809._ Oh the heart is a free and a fetterless thing,-- A wave of the ocean, a bird on the wing!

JULIA PARDOE (1816-1862): _The Captive Greek Girl._

You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore

Christopher Columbus

Past are three summers since she first beheld The ocean; all around the child await Some exclamation of amazement here. She coldly said, her long-lasht eyes abased, _Is this the mighty ocean? is this all?_ That wondrous soul Charoba once possest,-- Capacious, then, as earth or heaven could hold, Soul discontented with capacity,-- Is gone (I fear) forever. Need I say She was enchanted by the wicked spells Of Gebir, whom with lust of power inflamed The western winds have landed on our coast? I since have watcht her in lone retreat, Have heard her sigh and soften out the name.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 1775-1864.     _Gebir. Book ii._

The object of my book is to prove that the ocean, with the other seas, by means of the sun causes our world to shine like the moon and to appear as a star to other worlds; and this I will prove.

Leonardo da Vinci     Thoughts on Art and Life

It so happens that calcareous skeletons, exactly similar to the _Globigerinæ_ of the chalk, are being formed, at the present moment, by minute living creatures, which flourish in multitudes, literally more numerous than the sands of the sea-shore, over a large extent of that part of the earth's surface which is covered by the ocean.

T. H. Huxley     Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of T. H. Huxley

To succeed, you must have tremendous perseverance, tremendous will. I will drink the ocean, says the persevering soul; at my will mountains will crumble up. Have that sort of energy, that sort of will; work hard, and you will reach the goal.

Swami Vivekananda (born 12 January 1863

Were I so tall to reach the pole, Or grasp the ocean with my span, I must be measured by my soul: The mind 's the standard of the man.

ISAAC WATTS. 1674-1748.     _Hor? Lyric?. Book ii. False Greatness._

Fluvius cum mari certas=--You but a river, and contending with the ocean.

Proverb.

One of the things that makes you feel good is to get out into nature—go walking, go hiking, go swimming in the ocean, or wherever you live, in a river or a lake, experience the beauty of America, experience how America is such a sacred place. Everywhere you go in this land, our people have been there and they have said, “This place is sacred.

Charles Alexander Eastman

'T was whisper'd in heaven, 't was mutter'd in hell, And echo caught faintly the sound as it fell; On the confines of earth 't was permitted to rest, And the depths of the ocean its presence confess'd.

CATHERINE M. FANSHAWE (1764-1834): _Enigma. The letter H._

The ancients called man the world in miniature, and certainly the name is a happy one, because man being composed of earth, water, air and fire, the body of the earth resembles the body of man. As man has in him bones for the support and framework of his flesh, likewise in the world the rocks are the supports of the earth; as man has in him a pool of blood in which the lungs rise and fall in their breathing, so the body of the earth has its ocean which rises and falls every six hours as if the world breathed; as from the aforesaid pool of blood veins issue which {164} ramify throughout the human body, so does the ocean fill the body of the earth with innumerable veins of water. The body of the earth lacks sinews, which do not exist because sinews are made for movement, and the world being in perpetual stability no movement occurs, and there being no movement, sinews are not necessary; but in all other points they resemble each other greatly.

Leonardo da Vinci     Thoughts on Art and Life

The smallest effort is not lost, Each wavelet on the ocean tost Aids in the ebb-tide or the flow; Each rain-drop makes some floweret blow; Each struggle lessens human woe.

Charles Mackay

It’s like that one time you woke up and tripped down a rabbit hole and a blond girl in a blue dress kept asking you for directions but you couldn’t tell her, you had no idea, you kept trying to speak but your throat was full of rain clouds and it’s like someone has taken the ocean and filled it with silence and dumped it all over this room.

Tahereh Mafi

>The ocean may have bounds.

_Hitopadesa._

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is like an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

Mahatma Gandhi

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 (1813-1881): _Life on the Ocean Wave._

To the minnow every cranny and pebble, and quality and accident, of its little native creek may have become familiar; but does the minnow understand the ocean tides and periodic currents, the trade-winds, and monsoons, and moon's eclipses; by all of which the condition of its little creek is regulated, and may (from time to time, unmiraculously enough) be quite overset and reversed? Such a minnow is man; his creek, this planet earth; his ocean, the immeasurable All; his monsoons and periodic currents, the mysterious course of Providence through ?ons of ?ons.

_Carlyle._

Love one human being with warmth and purity, and thou wilt love the world. The heart, in that celestial sphere of love, is like the sun in its course. From the drop on the rose to the ocean, all is for him a mirror, which he fills and brightens.

_Jean Paul._

Were I so tall to reach the pole / Or grasp the ocean with my span, / I must be measured by my soul: / The mind's the standard of the man.

_Watts._

Everything that's realistic has some sort of ugliness in it. Even a flower is ugly when it wilts, a bird when it seeks its prey, the ocean when it becomes violent.

Sharon Tate (born 24 January 1943

He laid his hand upon "the Ocean's mane," And played familiar with his hoary locks.

ROBERT POLLOK. 1799-1827.     _The Course of Time. Book iv. Line 389._

SALVATION BELONGS TO THE LORD! — JONAH 2:9 Salvation is the work of God. It is He alone who quickens the soul “dead in . . . trespasses and sins,”1 and He it is who maintains the soul in its spiritual life. He is both “Alpha and Omega.” “Salvation belongs to the LORD!” If I am prayerful, God makes me prayerful; if I have graces, they are God’s gifts to me; if I hold on in a consistent life, it is because He upholds me with His hand. I do nothing whatever toward my own preservation, except what God Himself first does in me. Whatever I have, all my goodness is of the Lord alone. Whenever I sin, that is my own doing; but when I act correctly, that is wholly and completely of God. If I have resisted a spiritual enemy, the Lord’s strength nerved my arm. Do I live before men a consecrated life? It is not I, but Christ who lives in me. Am I sanctified? I did not cleanse myself: God’s Holy Spirit sanctifies me. Am I separated from the world? I am separated by God’s chastisements sanctified to my good. Do I grow in knowledge? The great Instructor teaches me. All my jewels were fashioned by heavenly art. I find in God all that I want; but I find in myself nothing but sin and misery. “He only is my rock and my salvation.”2 Do I feed on the Word? That Word would be no food for me unless the Lord made it food for my soul and helped me to feed upon it. Do I live on the bread that comes down from heaven? What is that bread but Jesus Christ Himself incarnate, whose body and whose blood I eat and drink? Am I continually receiving fresh supplies of strength? Where do I gather my might? My help comes from heaven’s hills: Without Jesus I can do nothing. As a branch cannot bring forth fruit except it abide in the vine, no more can I, except I abide in Him. What Jonah learned in the ocean, let me learn this morning in my room: “Salvation belongs to the LORD.

Charles H. Spurgeon

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.

Abraham Lincoln

She was his life, The ocean to the river of his thoughts, Which terminated all.

LORD BYRON 1788-1824.     _The Dream. Stanza 2._

The mind of a good man doth not alter, even when he is in distress; the waters of the ocean are not to be heated by a torch of straw.

_Hitopadesa._

There must be something beyond man in this world. Even on attaining to his highest possibilities, he is like a bird beating against his cage. There is something beyond, O deathless soul, like a sea-shell, moaning for the bosom of the ocean to which you belong!--_Chapin._

Maturin M. Ballou     Pearls of Thought

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is like an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

About Humanity

But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue Within, and they that lustre have imbibed In the sun's palace-porch, where when unyoked His chariot-wheel stands midway in the wave: Shake one, and it awakens; then apply Its polisht lips to your attentive ear, And it remembers its august abodes, And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 1775-1864.     _Gebir. Book i._ (1798).

Oh, the heart is a free and a fetterless thing-- / A wave of the ocean, a bird on the wing.

_J. Pardoe._

Come to the bridal chamber, Death! Come to the mother's, when she feels For the first time her first-born's breath! Come when the blessed seals That close the pestilence are broke, And crowded cities wail its stroke! Come in consumption's ghastly form, The earthquake shock, the ocean storm! Come when the heart beats high and warm, With banquet song, and dance, and wine! And thou art terrible!--the tear, The groan, the knell, the pall, the bier, And all we know or dream or fear Of agony are thine.

FITZ-GREENE HALLECK. 1790-1867.     _Marco Bozzaris._

I am the daughter of Earth and Water, And the nursling of the Sky; I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores; I change, but I cannot die.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Nothing is generated in a place where is no sentient vegetable and rational life; feathers grow on birds and change every year; coats grow on animals and are changed every year, with some {163} exceptions, like the lion's beard and the cat's fur, and such; grass grows in the fields and leaves on the trees; and every year they are renewed in great part. Thus we can say that the spirit of growth is the soul of the earth, the soil its flesh, the ordered arrangement of rocks its bones, of which mountains are formed, the tufa its tendons; its blood the veins of water which surround its heart, which is the ocean; its breathing and increase and decrease of blood in the pulses the ebb and flood of the sea; and the heat of the spirit of the world is fire which pervades the earth, and the vital soul dwells in the fires which from various apertures of the earth issue in springs and sulphur minerals and volcanoes, as at Mount Etna in Sicily and in many other places.

Leonardo da Vinci     Thoughts on Art and Life

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle.

Frederick Douglass

As down in the sunless retreats of the ocean Sweet flowers are springing no mortal can see, So deep in my soul the still prayer of devotion, Unheard by the world, rises silent to Thee. As still to the star of its worship, though clouded, The needle points faithfully o'er the dim sea, So dark when I roam in this wintry world shrouded, The hope of my spirit turns trembling to Thee.

THOMAS MOORE. 1779-1852.     _The Heart's Prayer._

La goutte de rosee a l'herbe suspendue, / y reflechit un ciel aussi vaste, aussi pur, / Que l'immense ocean dans ses plaines d'azur=--The drop of dew which hangs suspended from the grass-blade reflects a heaven as vast and pure as the ocean does in its wide azure plains.

_Lamartine._

So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed, And yet anon repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.

JOHN MILTON. 1608-1674.     _Lycidas. Line 168._

The shores of the sea continually increase in soil, towards the middle of the sea; the cliffs and promontories of the sea are continually being ruined and consumed; the mediterranean seas will dry up and all that will remain will be the channel of the greatest river which enters into them; this will flow to the ocean and pour out its waters together with that of all the rivers which are its tributaries.

Leonardo da Vinci     Thoughts on Art and Life

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

'Mahatma' (great soul), Gandhi

He who doth not speak an unkind word to his fellow-creatures is master of the whole world to the extremities of the ocean.

_Hitopadesa._

>The ocean beats against the stern dumb shore, / The stormy passion of its mighty heart.

_L. C. Moulton._

There is no sea more dangerous than the ocean of practical politics--none in which there is more need of good pilotage and of a single, unfaltering purpose when the waves rise high.

T. H. Huxley     Aphorisms and Reflections from the Works of T. H. Huxley

Rivers flow with sweet waters; but, having joined the ocean, they become undrinkable.

_Hitopadesa._

Were I so tall to reach the pole, Or grasp the ocean with my span, I must be measured by my soul; The mind's the standard of the man.

Isaac Watts ~ (born 17 July 1674

Strongly it bears us along in swelling and limitless billows; Nothing before and nothing behind but the sky and the ocean.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 1772-1834.     _The Homeric Hexameter._ (Translated from Schiller.)

Knowledge introduceth man to acquaintance; and, as the humble stream to the ocean, so doth it conduct him into the hard-acquired presence of the prince, whence fortune floweth.

_Hitopadesa._

"Twas bergen and the eirie road

Did mahwah into patterson:        "Beware the Hopatcong, my son!

All jersey were the ocean groves,    The teeth that bite, the nails

And the red bank bayonne.            that claw!

                    Beware the bound brook bird, and shun

He took his belmar blade in hand:    The kearney communipaw."

Long time the folsom foe he sought

Till rested he by a bayway tree        And, as in nutley thought he stood,

And stood a while in thought.        The Hopatcong with eyes of flame,

                    Came whippany through the englewood,

One, two, one, two, and through        And garfield as it came.

    and through

The belmar blade went hackensack!    "And hast thou slain the Hopatcong?

He left it dead and with it's head    Come to my arms, my perth amboy!

He went weehawken back.            Hohokus day!  Soho!  Rahway!"

                    He caldwell in his joy.

Did mahwah into patterson:

All jersey were the ocean groves,

And the red bank bayonne.

        -- Paul Kieffer

Fortune Cookie

A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but

won't cross the street to vote in a national election.

        -- Bill Vaughan

Fortune Cookie

Q:    What lies on the bottom of the ocean and twitches?

A:    A nervous wreck.

Fortune Cookie

Nature to all things fixed the limits fit,

And wisely curbed proud man's pretending wit.

As on the land while here the ocean gains,

In other parts it leaves wide sandy plains;

Thus in the soul while memory prevails,

The solid power of understanding fails;

Where beams of warm imagination play,

The memory's soft figures melt away.

        -- Alexander Pope (on runtime bounds checking?)

Fortune Cookie

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are

men who want rain without thunder and lightning.  They want the ocean</p>

without the roar of its many waters.

        -- Frederick Douglass

Fortune Cookie

And if California slides into the ocean,

Like the mystics and statistics say it will.

I predict this motel will be standing,

Until I've paid my bill.

        -- Warren Zevon, "Desperados Under the Eaves"

Fortune Cookie

'Twas midnight on the ocean,        Her children all were orphans,

Not a streetcar was in sight,        Except one a tiny tot,

So I stepped into a cigar store        Who had a home across the way

To ask them for a light.        Above a vacant lot.

The man    behind the counter        As I gazed through the oaken door

Was a woman, old and gray,        A whale went drifting by,

Who used to peddle doughnuts        Its six legs hanging in the air,

On the road to Mandalay.        So I kissed her goodbye.

She said "Good morning, stranger",    This story has a morale

Her eyes were dry with tears,        As you can plainly see,

As she put her head between her feet    Don't mix your gin with whiskey

And stood that way for years.        On the deep and dark blue sea.

        -- Midnight On The Ocean</p>

Fortune Cookie

Q:    What is green and lives in the ocean?

A:    Moby Pickle.

Fortune Cookie

<taniwha> Knghtbrd: it's not bloat if it's used

<Knghtbrd> taniwha: how do you explain windoze then?

<taniwha> Knghtbrd: most of it is used only as ballast to make sure your

          harddrive is full

<Knghtbrd> taniwha: ballast...  Isn't that what makes subs sink to the

           bottom of the ocean?

<Knghtbrd> taniwha: that would explain why winboxes are always going down.

Fortune Cookie

Be assured that a walk through the ocean of most Souls would scarcely

get your Feet wet.  Fall not in Love, therefore: it will stick to your face.

        -- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata"

Fortune Cookie

Though completely swamped, the boat was nearly unharmed. Swimming round it we picked up the floating oars, and lashing them across the gunwale, tumbled back to our places. There we sat up to our knees in the sea, the water covering every rib and plank, so that to our downward gazing eyes the suspended craft seemed a coral boat grown up to us from the bottom of the ocean.

Herman Melville     Moby Dick; or The Whale

Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste.

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 1794-1878.     _Thanatopsis._

When soon or late they reach that coast, / O'er life's rough ocean driven, / May they rejoice, no wanderer lost, / A family in heaven.

_Burns._

Let us make an exception in favor of Paris, nevertheless. In a relative measure, and in spite of the souvenir which we have just recalled, the exception is just. While in any other great city the vagabond child is a lost man, while nearly everywhere the child left to itself is, in some sort, sacrificed and abandoned to a kind of fatal immersion in the public vices which devour in him honesty and conscience, the street boy of Paris, we insist on this point, however defaced and injured on the surface, is almost intact on the interior. It is a magnificent thing to put on record, and one which shines forth in the splendid probity of our popular revolutions, that a certain incorruptibility results from the idea which exists in the air of Paris, as salt exists in the water of the ocean. To breathe Paris preserves the soul.

Victor Hugo     Les Miserables

All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance; it is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that distant countries are united with canals. If a man was to compare the single stroke of the pickaxe, or of one impression of the spade, with the general design and the last result, he would be overwhelmed by the sense of their disproportion; yet those petty operations, incessantly continued, in time surmount the greatest difficulties, and mountains are leveled and oceans bounded by the slender force of human beings.

Samuel Johnson

The eternity, before the world and after, is without our reach; but that little spot of ground which lies betwixt those two great oceans, this we are to cultivate.

_Burnet._

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

Herman Melville     Moby Dick; or The Whale

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