Some of the best quotes and thoughts about sailing that I've found over the years. They come from different sources, blogs, forums, magazines, websites...so it's kinda dificult for me to name all the authors. Anyway here they are:
1) "Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than those you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from safe harbor. Catch the wind in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
Mark Twain
2) "A bad day sailing is 100 times better than a good day at work"
3) "Sailing requires the management of all the systems on the boat, plus all the controls on the boat, while assessing the weather and navigation. It's planning everything to a fine level of detail and making the required adjustments all at the same time things are changing"
4) "There's nothing . . . absolutely nothing . . . half so much worth doing as simply throwing money at a boat."
5) "If you want to know what sailing is all about, just get in the shower with your clothes on, turn on the cold water, and eat a soggy peanut butter sandwich. While you're doing all this, drop a $100 down the drain every 2 minutes"
6) "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."
Captain Jack Sparrow
7) "Now I'm sick of a life that is too complicated. I want to wear shorts year round. I want to swim in the morning. I want to fish. I want to shop for fresh food in small markets. I don't want to work my butt off to make payments and then pay for insurance and cleaning and maintainence and upgrades for things that I really don't need to survive. I am cold and tired and I need a break. I don't want my job anymore. I want to laugh with my family in the sun. I want freedom."
8) "If a man is to be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most"
E.B. White
9) "20 MPH ain't fast unless, you do it in a 1000sq 3/2 house on 10foot waves"
10) “Would you get bored of cruising?” One of the replies stuck out in my mind. The poster said “I got bored…but it took six years. Best six years of my life! Nothing has to be forever to be worth doing!” In my mind that is perfect!
11) "You haven't been cold until you've been cold on a boat. I guess it's the humidity/moisture, but it is just REALLY cold."
Bill Dietrich
12) “The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.”
William Arthur Ward
13) "Se navega por los astros, por la mar, por la tierra, por las gentes, por los sentimientos...se navega."
Altair
14) "How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when clearly it is Ocean."
Arthur Clarke
15) "Any damn fool can navigate the world sober. It takes a really good sailor to do it drunk."
Sir Francis Chichester
16) "When a man comes to like a sea life, he is not fit to live on land."
Dr. Samuel Johnson
17) "Off Cape Horn there are but two kinds of weather, neither one of them a pleasant kind."
John Masefield
18) "For one thing, I was no longer alone; a man is never alone with the wind-and the boat made three."
Hilaire Belloc
19) "Sailors, with their built in sense of order, service and discipline, should really be running the world."
Nicholas Monsarrat
20) "I was born in the breezes, and I had studied the sea as perhaps few men have studied it, neglecting all else."
Joshua Slocum
21) "Only two sailors, in my experience, never ran aground. One never left port and the other was an atrocious liar."
Don Bamford
22) "Out of sight of land the sailor feels safe. It is the beach that worries him."
Charles G. Davis
23) "The goal is not to sail the boat, but rather to help the boat sail herself."
John Rousmaniere
24) "Prevention is, as in other aspects of seamanship, better than cure."
Sir Robin Knox-Johnston
25) "The question that used to bother me at times, do not weigh anything before the immensity of a wake so close to the sky and filled with the wind of the sea"
Bernard Moitessier
26) "To deal with men is as fine an art as it is to deal with ships. Both
men and ships live in an unstable element, are subject to subtle and
powerful influences, and want to have their merits understood rather
than their faults found out [...] After all, the art of handling ships
is finer, perhaps, than the art of handling men."
Joseph Conrad
27) “I really don't know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it is because in addition to the fact that the sea changes and the light changes, and ships change, it is because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it we are going back from whence we came."
J. F. K.
28) "Wherever we want to go, we go. 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...what she really is...is freedom."
Jack Sparrow
29) "Sailing a boat calls for quick action, a blending of feeling with the wind and watter as well as with the very heart and soul of the boat itself. Sailing teaches alertness and courage, and gives in retourn a joyousness and peace that but few sports afford."
George Matthew Adams
30) "Borders? I have never seen one. But I have heard they exist in the minds of some people."
Thor Heyerdahl
