Sea of life

“ The sea! the sea has in itself an inexpressibly rest-giving, healing, and regenerating power. If thou wilt commence within thyself, and without, a new life—cross the sea. Let the air and the life of the sea bathe thy soul for days and weeks. Everything becomes new and fresh upon the sea. ”

“ The sea, perhaps because of its saltness, roughens the outside but keeps sweet the kernel of its servants' soul. The old sea; the sea of many years ago, whose servants were devoted slaves and went from youth to age or to a sudden grave without needing to open the book of life, because they could look at eternity reflected on the element that gave the life and dealt the death. Like a beautiful and unscrupulous woman, the sea of the past was glorious in its smiles, irresistible in its anger, capricious, enticing, illogical, irresponsible; a thing to love, a thing to fear. ”

“ The glad waves leap up to embrace you; the free winds shout welcome in your ears; white sails are shining in the west; white sea-birds are flying over the gleaming swells. And from the infinite expanse of eternal sky and everlasting sea, there comes to you, with the heavenly ocean-breeze, a thrilling sense of unbounded freedom, a delicious feeling as of life renewed, an ecstasy as of life restored. ”

“ Sail forth into the sea of life,
O gentle, loving, trusting wife,
And safe from all adversity
Upon the bosom of that sea
Thy comings and thy goings be!
For gentleness and love and trust
Prevail o’er angry wave and gust;
And in the wreck of noble lives
Something immortal still survives! ”

“ This, I thought I might make them understand, was the only terrible sea, the only hopeless ocean from whose awful shore we must shrink and flee, the end of every voyage upon whose bosom was the bottom of its filthy waters, beyond the reach of all that is thought or spoken in the light, beyond life itself, but for the hand that reaches down from the upper ocean of truth, the hand of the Redeemer of men. ”

“ Let us consider how this doctrine of the sea may bring to our remembrance that twofold sea mentioned in Scripture: the sea of affliction and misery, and the sea of grace and comfort; the depths of misery, and the abyss of divine mercy. For what is this life and world of ours but a troublesome and tempestuous sea? As the sea is never at rest, but is perpetually ruffled with winds and waves, so is the life of man. Sometimes we fancy ourselves safe and out of danger, when suddenly a stormy wind arises, and the floods swell, to the great danger both of body and soul. ”

“ While enjoying the delightful scene, the passions are hushed. The sea seems the blest abode of tranquillity. We are alive only to its beauty, its grace, its magnitude, its power to interest and charm, to benefit mankind and beautify the world. ”

“ Like driftwood spars, which meet and pass
Upon the boundless ocean-plain,
So on the sea of life, alas! ”

“ It may easily be imagined that the whole scene by which we are here surrounded has over it an air of profound and deathlike stillness. The sea, where we behold nothing but water around us, presents more of life to divert the mind. ”

“ Only on the bounding blue, the grand, great sea, is one rocked into a peaceful rest at noon of day, at dusk of night, feeling that one is drifting, drifting, not seeing, or knowing, or caring, about fool mortals striving for life. ”

“ Not less is the ocean-bed to be described as a world of abounding Life.
Everywhere, throughout the whole sea, in all parts, above and below and between—near the surface, on the floor, in all intermediate reaches—living creatures flourish in numbers past imagination. ”

“ We know also that the bed of ocean, for at least four hundred years, has served as a repository, a burial-place, not only for earth's choicest productions and myriads of human beings, gone to the bottom in sunken ships, but for disappointed hopes, false calculations, and sanguine schemes for the realization of fortune and honor.
The immensity, the majesty, and the wonders of the sea are manifest, and acknowledged by all. ”

“ Even the sea, this tideless, brackish sea, neither salt water nor fresh, is dead. It’s all a pretty image of life without the real heart and soul of life. To a man with too strong desires who came here and lived close to nature, strange things might happen. ”

“ As you gaze upon the mighty world of waters over which you are about to sail, think of the great power of God who created the sea, and fixed its bounds; remember that you are sailing across the ocean of life, and that you will soon land on the shores of eternity ”

“ Coming into the Ocean, I found my self possest with a new Spirit, and if there was ever any such thing as transmigration of Souls, certainly it was at that time, some new drown’d Sea-mans Soul hovering on the Deep, took up its habitation in my body, entring in at my mouth as I gap’d for breath, which the swiftness of the Ships sailing, and tossing of the Waves together, had almost totally deprived me of. ”

“ My boy, in the sea of Divinity God, the sea of immortality. there is no fear of that kind. Do you not know that it is the sea of Immortality? Whosoever dives into this sea does not die but obtains everlasting life. ”

“ Thou wert ere Life, a dim but quenchless spark,
Found vesture in thy vastness. Thou shalt be
When Life hath crossed the threshold of the Dark,—
When shackling ice hath zoned at last thy breast,
And thy deep voice is hushed, O vanquished Sea!
One with eternity that giveth rest.
{41} II
No cloud is on the heavens, and on the sea
No sail: the immortal, solemn ocean lies
Unbroken sapphire to the walling skies—
Immutable, supreme in majesty.
The billows, where the charging foam leaps free,
Burden the winds with thunder. Soul, arise! ”

“ The sea-born people, who can meet and mingle no longer: who turn away from life, to the abstract, to the elements: the sea receives her own.
Let life come asunder, they say. Let water conceive no more with fire. ”

“ The light again brightens,—it is day; and over an expanse of ocean without visible bound the horizon has become wider and sharper of outline than before. There is life in that great sea,—invertebrate, mayhap also ichthyic, life; but, from the comparative distance of the point of view occupied by the prophet, only the slow roll of its waves can be discerned, as they rise and fall in long undulations before a gentle gale; and what most strongly impresses the eye is the change which has taken place in the atmospheric scenery. ”

“ We swim in a sea of environment and heredity, are tossed hither and thither by we know not what cross currents of Fate, are tugged at by a thousand eddies of which we never dream. The sum of it all makes Life, of which we know so little and guess so much, into which we dive so surely in those buoyant days before time and tide have shaken confidence in our power to snatch success and happiness from its mysterious depths.—From the Note Book of a Dreamer. ”

“ The great sea of life is swelling and receding, rising and falling, and we are responding to its vibrations and rhythm. In a normal condition we receive the vibration and rhythm of the great ocean of life, and respond to it, but at times the mouth of the inlet seems choked up with debris, and we fail to receive the impulse from Mother Ocean, and inharmony manifests within us. ”

“ As the sea everywhere, even down in those depths where the sun's light cannot pierce through the masses of water, is peopled by millions of creatures—every drop of water, as we might say, alive with life—I thought it a good one. ”

“ It was once thought that no life could exist in the ocean-depths, but we now know that life is everywhere—in air and water, upon the earth and within it, in the lowest depths of the sea, and on the highest mountain peaks, in hot and cold climates, and in the bodies of animals: all around us—earth, air, and water—teems with life. ”

“ A small divine instinct, following ignorantly in the wake of that great celestial love that hundreds of years ago stooped to the sorrow of life, urged her to renounce the ample strengths and joys of the sea, and to satisfy a piteous want, were it by repression of energies, by eschewing full flavours of sense, by the draining of her young life. ”

“ Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea, —long intervals of time, years, centuries, —are of no account. This which I think and feel underlay every former state of life and circumstances, as it does underlie my present, and what is called life, and what is called death. ”

“ Arrived in this great ocean of human life, where one living wave rushes past another as unrecognizant as the waves of the ordinary sea, his heart overflowing with domestic affections, he expends the few borrowed guineas in presents to his mother and sister, and sends them with flaming accounts of his prospect of honors for himself, and of wealth for them. ”

“ I have attempted here to lay bare with the unreserve of a last hour's confession the terms of my relation with the sea, which beginning mysteriously, like any great passion the inscrutable Gods send to mortals, went on unreasoning and invincible, surviving the test of disillusion, defying the disenchantment that lurks in every day of a strenuous life ”

“ When the world was wrapped in a mantle of seas, before the first continent thrust its rocky ridges above the waves, no doubt those warm waves swarmed with busy life. “The waters brought forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life”; and to-day, as in all previous ages, the sea is the headquarters and busy home of living things. In every zone the waters teem with animal organisms, so numerous that we doubt whether the sands on the shores, or the stars that fill space equal them for multitude. ”

“ More than ships that meet and fling a wild ahoy and pass,
On any alien tides however enchanted.
And the face of love, the evening face of love, at a window waiting,
Shall ever a kindled Light on any long-unlifting shore,
Shall ever a Harbor Light like that light matter?
Ah no! so enough of the sea and the soul for a season.
Too long followed they leave life as a dream,
Reality as a mirage when port is made.
[Pg 53] "Ever in sight of the human," is the helm-word of the wisest,
For earth is not earth to one upon the flood of infinity ”

“ It may be that the beauty and joy of the sea appeared more remarkable because of the great contrast between its free and wild life, and the crowded and stifled existence of the mortals who witnessed its gambols. ”

“ The sea as life.—At every turn of their ramified 105journey, these learners find life and, best of all, are having a rich experience in life, throughout the journey. They are immersed in life and so are absorbing life all the while. Wider and wider becomes their conception of life as exemplified by the sea, and their capacity for life is ever increasing. Day by day they ascend to higher levels and find their horizon receding farther and farther. For them, life enlarges until it embraces all lands, the arts, the sciences, the languages, and all history. ”

“ “By all that’s wonderful, it is the sea, I believe, the sea itself—or is it youth alone? Who can tell? But you here—you all had something out of life: money, love—whatever one gets on shore—and, tell me, wasn’t that the best time, that time when we were young at sea; young and had nothing, on the sea that gives nothing, except hard knocks—and sometimes a chance to feel your strength—that only—what you all regret?”
And we all nodded at him: ”

“ In his sea tales the sea inter-penetrates with life; it is in a subtle way a factor in the problem of existence, and, for all its greatness, it is always in touch with the men, who, bound on errands of war or gain, traverse its immense solitudes. ”

“ The great mystery—this thing organic which we call life—began in the sea. I gestured for Mary toward that leveled vista of gray water, to the warm, dark ocean depths, whose surface was now lashed always by titanic storms. But to us, as we stared, that surface seemed to stretch almost steady, save where it touched the land with a blur of changing configurations.
"The sea," I murmured. "Life is beginning there now."
n fancy I pictured it. The shallow shores of the sea, where the water was warmer. The mother of all life on Earth, these shallows. ”

“ The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides. The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. ”

“ On a lovely summer morning she woke to a sense of returning health. She had been lying like a waste shore, at low spring-tide, covered with dry seaweeds, withered jelly-fishes, and a multitudinous life that gasped for the ocean: at last, at last, the cool, washing throb of the great sea of bliss, whose fountain is the heart of God, had stolen upon her consciousness, and she knew that she lived. ”

“ The sea, washing the equator and the poles, offers its perilous aid, and the power and empire that follow it, — day by day to his craft and audacity. "Beware of me," it says, "but if you can hold me, I am the key to all the lands." ”

“ That sea—that mother of a million summers,
Who bore, with melody, a million springs,
Shall sing for my enchantment, as she sings
To life's forsaken ones, and death's newcomers. ”

“ With its untold depths, couldn’t the sea keep alive such huge specimens of life from another age, this sea that never changes while the land masses undergo almost continuous alteration? Couldn’t the heart of the ocean hide the last-remaining varieties of these titanic species, for whom years are centuries and centuries millennia? ”