# Sea

A sea is a large body|salt water that is surrounded in whole or in part by land. More broadly, "the sea" is the interconnected system of Earth's salty, oceanic waters—considered as one global ocean or as several principal oceanic divisions. The sea moderates Earth's climate and has important roles in the water cycle, carbon cycle, and nitrogen cycle.

## Quotes

* Θάλαττα! θάλαττα!
** Thalatta! Thalatta!
*** The sea, the sea!
**** Anonymous Greek soldiers at the top of a great dune, when they saw the sea, recorded by Xenophon, in Anabasis
* There is something deeply impressive about the night sea as one experiences it from a small vessel far from land. When I stood on the afterdeck on those dark nights, on a tiny man-made island of wood and steel, dimly seeing the great shapes of waves that rolled about us, I think I was conscious as never before that ours is a water world, dominated by the immensity of the sea.
** Rachel Carson Speech (1954) In Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1998)
* It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.
** Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us (1951)
* I tell you naught for your comfort, Yea, naught for your desire, Save that the sky grows darker yet And the sea rises higher.
** G. K. Chesterton, in The Ballad of the White Horse (1911) Book I : The Vision of the King
* Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea! And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony.
** Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner
* A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover that there is another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats.
** Stephen Crane, The Open Boat (1894)
* For whatever we lose (like a you or a me) it's always ourselves we find in the sea.
** E. E. Cummings, "maggie and millie and mollie and may" in 95 Poems (1958)
* Enten ... shaped lagoons in the water of the sea. He let fish and birds together come into existence by the sea.
** Debate between Winter and Summer (mid to late 3rd millennium BCE).
* The sea did what it liked, and what it liked was destruction. It thundered at the town, and thundered at the cliffs, and brought the coast down, madly.
** Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, Book 1, Chapter 4: The Preparation: Page 2 (1859)
* This much is certain: We have the power to damage the sea, but no sure way to heal the harm.
** Sylvia Earle Sea Change: A Message of the Oceans (1995)
* Even if you never have the chance to see or touch the ocean, the ocean touches you with every breath you take, every drop of water you drink, every bite you consume. Everyone, everywhere is inextricably connected to and utterly dependent upon the existence of the sea.
** Sylvia Earle The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One (2009)
* The sea has many voices, Many gods and many voices.
** T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets: The Dry Salvages (1941)
* The sea is the sweat of the earth.
** Empedocles Bk. 1, line 165; p. 179
* The dragon-green, the luminous, the dark, the serpent-haunted sea,
** James Elroy Flecker, "The Gates of Damascus"
** Collected Poems (Doubleday, Page & Co., 1916)
* The mackerel-crowded seas,
** William Butler Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium" (1927, 1928)
* God! he said quietly. Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks! I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look.
** James Joyce, Ulysses, Ch. 1
** The Little Review (March 1918)
* The sea, that great library of books one cannot read.
** Ian Fleming, Live and Let Die (1954), Chapter 17, The Undertaker's Wind
* I have seen the sea lashed into fury and tossed into spray, and its grandeur moves the soul of the dullest man; but I remember that it is not the billows, but the calm level of the sea from which all heights and depths are measured.
** James A. Garfield, speech nominating John Sherman for president; Proceedings of the Republican National Convention, Chicago, Illinois, June 2–8, 1880 (1881), p. 184. Garfield himself was ultimately nominated at this convention.
* Praise the sea, but keep on land.
** George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum (1651).
* I am not at sea because I object to bad treatment, poor food, poor wages, and worse prospects. I am not at sea because very early I discovered that it is a comfortless, weariful and thankless life — a life compact of hardness and sordidness such as shore people can scarcely conceive. I am not at sea because I dislike being a pawn with the sea for a board and the shipowners for players.
** William Hope Hodgson, ‘Is the Mercantile Navy Worth Joining?—Certainly Not.’ 1905. The Grand Magazine, September 1905.
* We have fed our sea for a thousand years And she calls us, still unfed, Though there's never a wave of all her waves But marks our English dead.
** Rudyard KiplingThe Song of the Dead, II, Stanza 1 (1896).
* It keeps eternal whisperings around Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell Gluts twice ten thousand Caverns, till the spell Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound.
** John Keats, On the Sea (1817)
* Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won. The skies no longer rain death; the seas bear only commerce.
** Douglas MacArthur, radio address (2 September 1945).
* I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.
** John Masefield, Sea-Fever
* Many years ago I was a boy drowning in the sea. I am always drowning in the sea... down amongst the dead men, deep down. There is a peace in the sea back down to our origins... when the last man has taken his breath the sea will still be remaining. It washes everything clean. It holds within it forever the boy suspended in its body and the streaming hair and the open eyes.
** Dennis Nilsen, as quoted by Brian Masters (2011), Killing for Company, Random House, p. 49, ISBN 1446428737
* Oh salty sea, how much of your salt are tears of Portugal!
** Fernando Pessoa, Poem "Mar Português" (1934), lines 1–2
* The precious stone set in the silver sea.
** William Shakespeare, Richard II (c. 1595), Act II, scene 1, line 46.
* The unsheltered sea heaves and heaves and blanches into foam. It sets me thinking of some tied-up monster straining at its bonds, in front of whose gaping jaws we build our homes on the shore and watch it lashing its tail. What immense strength, with waves swelling like the muscles of a giant! From the beginning of creation there has been this feud between land and water: the dry earth slowly and silently adding to its domain and spreading a broader and broader lap for its children; the ocean receding step by step, heaving and sobbing and beating its breast in despair. Remember the sea was once sole monarch, utterly free. Land rose from its womb, usurped its throne, and ever since the maddened old creature, with hoary crest of foam, wails and laments continually, like King Lear exposed to the fury of the elements.
** Rabindranath Tagore, Glimpses of Bengal: A Selection of Letters (Macmillan and Co., 1921), October 1885
* He who controls the sea controls everything.
** Themistocles as quoted in Australia Defence
* All that is told of the sea has a fabulous sound to an inhabitant of the land, and all its products have a certain fabulous quality, as if they belonged to another planet, from seaweed to a sailor’s yarn, or a fish story. In this element the animal and vegetable kingdoms meet and are strangely mingled.
** Henry David Thoreau
* Beware of the Sea! If thou hearest the cry of the gull on the shore, Thy heart shall then rest in the forest no more.
** J.R.R. Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings, The Lady Galadriel to Legolas Greenleaf
* Behold, the sea itself
** Walt Whitman, Song of the Exposition
* Under the sea, darling it's better. Down where it's wetter, take it from me.
** Samuel E. Wright, "Under the Sea", The Little Mermaid
* Listen to that bitch—the sea—that maker of widows.
** Zorba the Greek (1964 film)

### Bible

The Bible on Wikisource
* All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full; unto the place where the rivers come, thither they return again.
** Ecclesiastes 1:7 (KJV)
* On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea.
** Jesus, in Gospel of Luke 21:25-26 (NIV).
* The burden of the desert of the sea.
** Book of Isaiah 21:1.
* If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea.
** Psalms 139:9.

### Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

    Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 554-57.
* The sea heaves up, hangs loaded o'er the land, Breaks there, and buries its tumultuous strength.
** Robert Browning, Luria, Act I.
* I never was on the dull, tame shore, But I loved the great sea more and more.
** Barry Cornwall, The Sea.
* The sea! the sea! the open sea! The blue, the fresh, the ever free! Without a mark, without a bound, It runneth the earth's wide regions round; It plays with the clouds; it mocks the skies; Or like a cradled creature lies.
** Barry Cornwall, The Sea.
* Behold the Sea, The opaline, the plentiful and strong, Yet beautiful as is the rose in June, Fresh as the trickling rainbow of July; Sea full of food, the nourisher of kinds, Purger of earth, and medicine of men; Creating a sweet climate by my breath, Washing out harms and griefs from memory, And, in my mathematic ebb and flow, Giving a hint of that which changes not.
** Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sea Shore.
* The sea is flowing ever, The land retains it never.
** Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Hikmet Nameh, Book of Proverbs.
* There is many a rich stone laid up in the bowells of the earth, many a fair pearle in the bosome of the sea, that never was seene nor never shall bee.
** Bishop Hall, Contemplations, Veil of Moses, I, VI, p. 872. See Quarterly Review, No, XXII, p. 314.
* The hollow sea-shell, which for years hath stood On dusty shelves, when held against the ear Proclaims its stormy parent, and we hear The faint, far murmur of the breaking flood. We hear the sea. The Sea? It is the blood In our own veins, impetuous and near.
** Eugene Lee Hamilton, Sonnet, Sea-shell Murmurs.
* The sea appears all golden Beneath the sun-lit sky.
** Heinrich Heine, Book of Songs, New Poems, Seraphina, No. 15.
* Of the loud resounding sea.
** Homer, The Iliad, Book IX. 182.
* Come o'er the moonlit sea, The waves are brightly glowing.
** Charles Jefferys, The Moonlit Sea.
* Tut! the best thing I know between France and England is the sea.
** Douglas Jerrold, Jerrold's Wit, The Anglo-French Alliance.
* Love the sea? I dote upon it—from the beach.
** Douglas Jerrold, Specimen of Jerrold's Wit, Love of the Sea.
* The land is dearer for the sea, The ocean for the shore.
** Lucy Larcom, On the Beach, Stanza 11.
* "Would'st thou,"—so the helmsman answered, "Learn the secret of the sea? Only those who brave its dangers Comprehend its mystery!"
** Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Secret of the Sea, Stanza 8.
* It is a pleasure for to sit at ease Upon the land, and safely for to see How other folks are tossed on the seas That with the blustering winds turmoiled be.
** Lucretius, translated from Amyot's Introduction to Plutarch, by Sir Thomas North. (1579).
* Distinct as the billows, yet one as the sea.
** James Montgomery, The Ocean, Stanza 6.
* Why does the sea moan evermore? Shut out from heaven it makes its moan, It frets against the boundary shore; All earth's full rivers cannot fill The sea, that drinking thirsteth still.
** Christina G. Rossetti, By the Sea, Stanza 1.
* Streak of silver sea.
** Lord Salisbury. Quoted from Col. Chesney, who also quoted it. Used by Gladstone, writing of the English Channel, in Edinburgh Review, Oct. 18, 1870.
* The Channel is that silver strip of sea which severs merry England from the tardy realms of Europe.
** In the Church and State Review (April 1, 1863).
* There the sea I found Calm as a cradled child in dreamless slumber bound.
** Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Revolt of Islam, Canto I, Stanza 15.
* I loved the Sea. Whether in calm it glassed the gracious day With all its light, the night with all its fires; Whether in storm it lashed its sullen spray, Wild as the heart when passionate youth expires; Or lay, as now, a torture to my mind, In yonder land-locked bay, unwrinkled by the wind.
** Richard Henry Stoddard, Carmen Naturæ Triumphale, line 192.
* Break, break, break, On thy cold gray stones, oh sea! And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me.
** Alfred Tennyson, Break, Break, Break.
* Littus ama; altum alii teneant.
** Love the shore; let others keep to the deep sea.
** Virgil, Æneid (29-19 BC), V. 163–4 (adapted).

## See also

* Geography
* Maritime law
* Navy
* Oceans
* Ponds
* River
* Water
* Wind wave