Set sail for adventure and inspiration with our collection of sailor quotes to capture the spirit of the sea and the allure of the unknown.
Sailors have explored the world, fought in battles, and transported goods across oceans. They have faced the dangers of storms and sea monsters and celebrated the beauty of the open ocean.
The life of a sailor is one of adventure and challenge, where skills like navigation and teamwork are essential. Beyond the practical skills, sailing has also inspired art, literature, and music.
The sea and the sailor have become symbols of freedom, independence, and the spirit of exploration. In this way, sailors have become a source of inspiration and fascination for people around the world. That’s why we gathered the best sailor quotes.
Whether you’re a seasoned sailor or simply drawn to the sea, there’s something about the sailor’s life that captures the imagination and calls us to adventure. To offer a glimpse into the life of those who brave the open ocean and the mysteries that lie beyond, let’s dive these sailor quotes!
Sailor quotes inspirational
Get motivated to set sail on your own journey with these inspiring sailor quotes.
A ship in the harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.
William Shedd
Sailors, with their built–in sense of order, service, and discipline, should really be running the world.
Nicholas Monsarrat
Any damn fool can navigate the world sober. It takes a really good sailor to do it drunk.
Francis Chichester
A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.
Honore de Balzac
I must go down to the sea 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
The wind and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigator.
Edmund Gibbon
I don’t know who named them swells. There’s nothing swell about them. They should have named them awfuls.
Hugo Vihlen
We are imprisoned in the realm of life, like a sailor on his tiny boat, on an infinite ocean.
Anna Freud
I wanted freedom, open air and adventure. I found it on the sea.
Alain Gerbault
There is but a plank between a sailor and eternity.
Thomas Gibbons
Sailor quotes
Experience the awe and wonder of the sea with this section of the best sailor quotes that are sure to inspire and uplift!
You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.
Christopher Columbus
My piano is to me what a ship is to the sailor, what a steed is to the Arab. It is the intimate personal depository of everything that stirred wildly in my brain during the most impassioned days of my youth. It was there that all my wishes, all my dreams, all my joys, and all my sorrows lay.
Franz Liszt
At sea, I learned how little a person needs, not how much.
Robin Lee Graham
I got a part as a chorus girl in a show called Every Sailor and I had fun doing it. Mother didn’t really approve of it, through.
James Cagney
What do you want to be a sailor for? There are greater storms in politics than you will ever find at sea. Piracy, broadsides, blood on the decks. You will find them all in politics.
David Lloyd George
Calm seas never made a good sailor
Franklin D. Roosevelt
A young sailor boy came to see me to–day. It pleases me to have these lads seek me on their return from their first voyage, and tell me how much they have learned about navigation.
Maria Mitchell
The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.
William Arthur Ward
A sailor is an artist whose medium is the wind. Live passionately, even if it kills you, because something is going to kill you anyway.
Webb Chiles
Any fool can carry on, but a wise man knows how to shorten sail in time.
Joseph Conrad
Sailor quotes short
Feel the wind in your sails with our section of short sailor quotes that capture the beauty and vastness of the ocean!
Ships are the nearest things to dreams that hands have ever made, for somewhere deep in their oaken hearts the soul of a song is laid.
Robert N. Rose
Ten geographers who think the world is flat will tend to reinforce each other’s errors … Only a sailor can set them straight.
John Ralston Saul
He wants his home and security, he wants to live like a sailor at sea.
Bob Seger
It is of great use to the sailor to know the length of his line, though he cannot with it fathom all the depths of the ocean.
John Locke
The art of the sailor is to leave nothing to chance.
Annie Van De Wiele
A sailor is an artist whose medium is the wind.
Webb Chiles
Until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore, you will not know the terror of being forever lost at sea.
Charles Cook
We must free ourselves of the hope that the sea will ever rest. We must learn to sail in high winds.
Aristotle Onassis
The sea hates a coward.
Eugene O’Neill
There is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.
Kenneth Grahame
Sailor quotes for Instagram
Celebrate the spirit of exploration and adventure with our handpicked selection of sailor quotes!
Smooth seas don’t produce skillful sailors.
Lynn Austin
A great mind is a good sailor, as a great heart is.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The wonder is always new that any sane man can be a sailor.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A sailor’s joys are as simple as a child’s.
Bernard Moitessier
I’m fond of anything that comes from the sea, and that includes sailors.
Janet Flanner
She been looking like a queen in a sailor’s dream.
Gordon Lightfoot
Navigation is easy. If it wasn’t, they wouldn’t be able to teach it to Sailors.
James Lawrence
I wanted freedom, open–air, and adventure. I found it on the sea.
Alaine Gerbault
It is not the ship so much as the skilful sailing that assures the prosperous voyage.
George William Curtis
He that will not sail till all dangers are over must never put to sea.
Thomas Fuller
Sailor quotes about life
Discover the beauty and danger of the ocean life with these ten sailor quotes!
How happy is the sailor’s life, from coast to coast to roam; in every port he finds a wife, in every land a home.
Isaac Bickerstaffe
The sailor is frankness, the landsman is finesse. Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long head
Herman Melville
It is part of a sailor’s life to die well.
Stephen Decatur
When we came within sight of the sea, the waves on the horizon, caught at intervals above the rolling abyss, were like glimpses of another shore with towers and buildings.
Charles Dickens
It is unacceptable to risk the lives of American soldiers and sailors merely to accommodate the sexual lifestyles of certain individuals.
Larry Craig
The wind of God’s grace is incessantly blowing. Lazy sailors on the sea of life do not take advantage of it. But the active and strong always keep the sails of their minds unfurled to catch the favorable winds and thus reach their destination very soon.
Mahatma Gandhi
It isn’t that life ashore is distasteful to me. But life at sea is better.
Francis Drake
Although as a sailor I despised politics – for I loved my sailor’s life and still love it today – conditions forced me to take up a definite attitude towards political problems.
Fritz Sauckel
When engaged in safe occupations, and living in healthy countries, men are much more apt to be frugal, than in unhealthy, or hazardous occupations, and in climates pernicious to human life. Sailors and soldiers are prodigals.
John Rae
The cabin of a small yacht is truly a wonderful thing; not only will it shelter you from a tempest, but from the other troubles in life, it is a safe retreat.
L. Francis Herreshoff
Funny sailor quotes
If you need a good laugh and smile, dive into a world of adventure and inspiration with these funny sailor quotes!
No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned… a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.
Samuel Johnson
Out of sight of land the sailor feels safe. It is the beach that worries him.
Charles Davis
If it wasn’t for seasickness, all the world would be sailors.
Charles Darwin
There are three sorts of people; those who are alive, those who are dead, and those who are at sea.
Aristotle
A fine imagination is one of the gifts of the ocean–witness the surprising and unlimited power of expression and epithet possessed by the sailor. And a fine imagination will frequently manifest itself in other ways besides swear words.
Gertrude Bacon
Only two sailors, in my experience, never ran aground. One never left port and the other was an atrocious liar.
Don Bamford
If my ship sails from sight, it doesn’t mean my journey ends, it simply means the river bends.
Enoch Powell
The Hawaiian Islands were discovered by hardy Polynesian sailors, who crossed thousands of miles of open ocean in primitive canoes, braving violent storm–tossed seas for months at a time. My family and I arrived by modern commercial aviation, which was infinitely worse.
Dave Barry
A man can pretend to be a lot of things in this world; but he can only pretend to be a sailor for as long as it takes to clear the harbor mouth!
Bernard Hayman
The sailor cannot see the north, but knows the needle can.
Emily Dickinson
Sailor sayings
Raise your sail one foot and you get ten feet of wind.
Chinese Proverb
It is good sailing with wind and tide.
Dutch Proverbs
You are not a fully fledged sailor unless you have sailed under full sail.
Irish Proverbs
Two captains sink a ship.
Turkish Proverbs
He who plunders with a little boat is a pirate; he who plunders with a fleet is a conqueror.
Greek Proverb
Don’t sail out further than you can row back.
Danish Proverbs
Too many hands will row the boat up a mountain.
Japanese Proverbs
Sailors get to know each other better when there is a storm.
French Proverb
There is no wind that blows right for the sailor who doesn’t know where the harbor is.
Norwegian Proverbs
If you are going to fight, pray once; if you are going to sail, pray twice; if you are getting married, then pray thrice.
Polish Proverbs
Sailor quotes about the sea
One can no more keep the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. For a sailor, this is called the tide; in the case of the guilty it is called remorse. God stirs up the soul as well as the ocean.
Victor Hugo
A sailor may choose the wind to ride out of seaport, but the wind has a mind of it’s own.
Avi
A married man forms married habits and becomes dependent on marriage just as a sailor becomes dependent on the sea.
George Bernard Shaw
And the voices in the waves are always whispering to Florence, in their ceaseless murmuring, of love – of love, eternal and illimitable, not bounded by the confines of this world, or by the end of time, but ranging still, beyond the sea, beyond the sky, to the invisible country far away!
Charles Dickens
Time and tide will wait for no man, saith the adage. But all men have to wait for time and tide.
Charles Dickens
I feel at home up in the air, just like sailors do at sea and climbers do in the mountains.
Felix Baumgartner
Our ideals resemble the stars, which illumintate the night. No one will ever be able to touch them. But the men who, like the sailors on the ocean, take them for guides, will undoubtedly reach their goal.
Carl Schurz
No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.
Herman Melville
All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them
Leonard Cohen
The only ship you can truly steer in this ocean is the one you’re sailing. Quit trying to alter the winds; harness them.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Meaningful sailor quotes
He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.
Leonardo da Vinci
When a sailor overcomes crushing adversity, there’s a massive sense of accomplishment.
Abby Sunderland
For a sailor to sail around the world, the thought is just, sometimes, too much. Thus, one simply goes from port to port in the same direction.
Hal Moore
Istanbul, a universal beauty where poet and archeologist, diplomat and merchant, princess and sailor, northerner and westerner screams with same admiration. The whole world thinks that this city is the most beautiful place on earth.
Edmondo De Amicis
That’s what a ship is, you know – it’s not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that’s what a ship needs. But what a ship is… really is… is freedom.
Capt. Jack Sparrow
A ship on the port always waits for you to sail to the oceans!
Mehmet Murat ildan
That’s what sailing is, a dance, and your partner is the sea. And with the sea you never take liberties. You ask her, you don’t tell her. You have to remember always that she’s the leader, not you. You and your boat are dancing to her tune.
Michael Morpurgo
He is the best sailor who can steer within fewest points of the wind and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.
Henry David Thoreau
Wind to a sailor is what money is to life on shore.
Sterling Hayden
We must always remember with gratitude and admiration the first sailors who steered their vessels through storms and mists, and increased our knowledge of the lands of ice in the South.
Roald Amundsen
Conclusion
From this article, we know that sailor quotes offer a glimpse into the unique and adventurous life of a sailor, inspiring and motivating us to explore and conquer the unknown. The quotes reflect the awe and wonder of the sea, the challenges that come with it, and the determination and resilience required to overcome them.
Whether you are an experienced sailor, a lover of the sea, or simply seeking inspiration, these sailor quotes can help you embrace the new adventure. With this collection, we hope to inspire and motivate you to set sail on your own journey of life, whatever it may be.
Did you enjoy our article? Did you find the quotes that speak to you? If so, feel free to share our collection of sailor quotes with friends and family. Life is journey, so go ahead make your own journey and embrace your life path. Thanks for reading!