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Quotations:
Sailors:
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailors home from sea,
(T.S.Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922)
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.
(Wallace Stevens, Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock, 1923)
Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie.
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
'Here lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.'
(Robert Louis Stevenson, Underwoods 1887)
A sailor's wife had chestnuts in her lap,
And munched, and munched, and munched: 'Give
me,' quoth I:
'Aroint thee, witch!' the rump-fed ronyon cries.
Her husband's to Aleppo gone, master o' the Tiger:
But in a sieve I'll thither sail,
And, like a rat without a tail,
I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do.
(Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1606)
I'll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall;
I'll slay more gazers than the basilisk;
I'll play the orator as well as Nestor,
Deceive more slyly than Ulysses could,
And, like a Sinon, take another Troy.
(Shakespeare, Henry VI, 1592)
Ships are but boards, sailors but men; there be
land-rats and water-rats, land-thieves and
water-thieves.
(Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 1596)
No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough
to get himself into a jail; for being in 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 [1709-1784], Boswell Life 1759)
We are like sailors who must rebuild their ship in the
open sea, never able to dismantle it in dry-dock and to
reconstruct it there out of the best materials.
(Otto Neurath [1882-1945], Protocol Sentences, 1959)
This City now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
(William Wordsworth [1770-1850], Composed upon Westminster Bridge, 1807)
The Mermaid:
One Friday morn when we set sail,
And our ship not far from land,
We there did espy a fair pretty maid,
With a comb and a glass in her hand.
While the raging seas did roar,
And the stormy winds did blow,
And the jolly sailor-boys were all up aloft
And the land-lubbers lying down below.
(Traditional song)
But the standing toast that pleased the most
Was -The wind that blows, the ship that goes,
And the lass that loves a sailor!
(Charles Dibdin [1745-1814], The Lass that Loves a Sailor, 1811)
They'll tell thee, sailors, when away,
In ev'ry port a mistress find.
(John Gay [1685-1732], Sweet William's Farewell to Black-Eyed Susan, 1720)
Stars:
Ideals are like stars: you will not succeed in touching them with your hands, but like the seafaring man on the ocean desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them, you reach your destiny.
Carl Schurz (1829 - 1906)
No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars or sailed an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.
Helen Keller (1880 - 1968)
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