73 Maritime Quotes

Following is our list of maritime quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about marine.

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Famous Maritime Quotes

We are as near to heaven by sea as by land. — Sir Humphrey Gilbert

In Sea affairs, nothing is impossible, and nothing is improbable. — Horatio Nelson

A Marine should be sworn to the patient endurance of hardships, like the ancient knights; and it is not the least of these necessary hardships to have to serve with sailors. — Bernard Law Montgomery

Great sea captains are made in rough waters and deep seas. — Kathryn Kuhlman

Our present control of the sea is so absolute that it is sometimes taken for granted. — Chester W. Nimitz

The ocean is a mighty harmonist. — William Wordsworth

A smooth sea never made a skillful mariner. - English Proverbs

A smooth sea never made a skillful mariner. — English Proverbs

It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top. — Hunter S. Thompson

Sailors, with their built in sense of order, service and discipline, should really be running the world. — Nicholas Monsarrat

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. — Jules Verne

I wanted freedom, open air and adventure. I found it on the sea. - Alain Gerbault

I wanted freedom, open air and adventure. I found it on the sea. — Alain Gerbault

The sea is as near as we come to another world. — Anne Stevenson

When the sea is calm, every ship has a good captain. — Swedish Proverbs

It isn't that life ashore is distasteful to me. But life at sea is better. — Francis Drake

Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part. — Hermann Broch

Short Maritime Quotes

  • At sea, I learned how little a person needs, not how much. — Robin Lee Graham
  • Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash. — Winston Churchill
  • Close with a Frenchman, but out-maneuver a Russian. — Horatio Nelson
  • It's the maritime equivalent of rock climbing. — Cesar Romero
  • One sailor will do us more good than two soldiers. — John Adams
  • An income means life to wretched mortals, but it is a terrible fate to die among the waves. — Hesiod

Maritime Image Quotes

Mariner Quotes

Every time a boy falls off a tricycle, every time a black cat has gray kittens, every time someone stubs a toe, every time there's a murder or a fire or the marines land in Nicaragua, the police and the newspapers holler 'get Capone.' — Al Capone

We have reached the time in the life of the planet, and humanity's demand upon it, when every fisherman will have to be a river-keeper, a steward of marine shallows, a watchman on the high seas. We are beyond having to put back what we have taken out. We must put back more than we take out. — Thomas Mcguane

The sea will grant each man new hope, and sleep will bring dreams of home. — Larry Ferguson

The deadliest weapon in the world is a MARINE and his rifle! — John J. Pershing

The sea! The sea! The open sea!, The blue, the fresh, the ever free! - Bryan Procter

The sea! The sea! The open sea!, The blue, the fresh, the ever free! — Bryan Procter

The best way to observe a fish is to become a fish. — Jacques Yves Cousteau

Leadership is the sum of those qualities of intellect, human understanding, and moral character that enables a person to inspire and control a group of people successfully. — John A. Lejeune

The Marines I have seen around the world have the cleanest bodies, the filthiest minds, the highest morale, and the lowest morals of any group of animals I have ever seen. Thank God for the United States Marine Corps! — Eleanor Roosevelt

My soul is full of longing for the secret of the sea — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

With 300 Marines, you could probably take over Iraq if you wanted to and get rid of ISIS completely. Make no mistake about it, Marines are war fighters. I mean they are really good at what they do. The only time they are not good at what they do is when someone puts the shackles on them. — Marcus Luttrell

Marine Quotes

We've backed off in good faith to try and give you a chance to straighten this problem out. But I am going to beg with you for a minute. I'm going to plead with you, do not cross us. Because if you do, the survivors will write about what we do here for 10,000 years. — James Mattis

Why in hell can't the Army do it if the Marines can. They are the same kind of men; why can't they be like Marines. — John J. Pershing

They're on our right, they're on our left, they're in front of us, they're behind us; they can't get away from us this time. — Chesty Puller

No aquarium, no tank in a marine land, however spacious it may be, can begin to duplicate the conditions of the sea. And no dolphin who inhabits one of those aquariums or one of those marine lands can be considered normal. — Jacques Yves Cousteau

The Marines don't have any race problems. They treat everybody like they're black. — Daniel James, Jr.

I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. — Smedley Butler

**** the torpedoes! Full speed ahead! - David Farragut

**** the torpedoes! Full speed ahead! — David Farragut

The raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next 500 years. — James Forrestal

Old breed? New breed? There's not a damn bit of difference so long as it's the Marine breed. — Chesty Puller

By their victory, the 3rd, 4th and 5th Marine Divisions and other units of the Fifth Amphibious Corps have made an accounting to their country which only history will be able to value fully. Among the Americans who served on Iwo Island, uncommon valor was a common virtue. — Chester W. Nimitz

People Writing About Maritime

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Read quotes by Horatio Nelson

Horatio Nelson
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Read quotes by Bernard Law Montgomery

Bernard Law Montgomery
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Read quotes by Kathryn Kuhlman

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Read quotes by Chester W. Nimitz

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Read quotes by William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth
quotes on nature, love and life

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Read quotes by English Proverbs

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quotes on patience, folklore and values

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More Maritime Quotes

[Somali maritime violence] is a response to greedy Western nations, who invade and exploit Somalia's water resources illegally. It is not a piracy, it is self defence. It is defending the Somalia children's food. — Muammar al-Gaddafi

Canada is like an old cow. The West feeds it. Ontario and Quebec milk it. And you can well imagine what it's doing in the Maritimes. — Tommy Douglas

Egypt struggles to cope with guarding the Suez Canal, through which passes 8% of the world's entire trade every day. Some 9% of the world's oil passes this way daily; closing the canal would add about 15 days' transit time to Europe and 10 to the U.S. — Tim Marshall

Much of the Greek coastline comprises steep cliffs and there are few coastal plains for agriculture. Inland are more steep cliffs, rivers that will not allow transportation, and few wide, fertile valleys. There is too little good agricultural land for Greece to become a major agricultural exporter, or to develop more than a handful of major urban areas containing highly educated, highly skilled, and technologically advanced populations. Its situation is further exacerbated by its location, with Athens positioned at the tip of the peninsula, almost cut off from land trade with Europe. It is reliant on the Aegean Sea for access to maritime trade in the region — but across that sea lies Turkey, a large potential enemy. Greece spends a vast amount of euros, which it doesn’t have, on defense. There are about 1,400 Greek islands 6,000 if you include various rocks sticking out of the Aegean of which approximately 200 are inhabited. It takes a decent navy just to patrol this territory, never mind one strong enough to defer any attempt to take the islands over. The result is a huge cost in military spending that Greece doesn’t have. During the Cold War, the Americans, and to a lesser extent, the British were content to underwrite some of the military requirements in order to keep the Soviet Union out of the Aegean and the Mediterranean. When the Cold War ended, so did the checks. — Tim Marshall

From protecting our natural resources to providing maritime security and national defense, the Coast Guard's duties are broad in scope, and the performance of those duties has never been more important. — Russ Carnahan

The Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Act is an important authorization for our country and for our citizens, as we have seen so vividly in the last few weeks. — Russ Carnahan

That a modern battleship of 48,000 tons would have to defend itself against wood and fabric biplanes with its main armament was a salutary reminder of the changing face of sea warfare. — Richard Hough

Well the most likely emerging countries are Japan, Turkey, and Poland. So I would say Eastern Europe, the Middle East and a maritime war by Japan with the United States enjoying its own pleasures. — George Friedman

I went back to Belfast and started a club, the Maritime. No one had thought about doing a blues club, so I was the first. — Van Morrison

No big modern war has been won without preponderant sea power; and, conversely, very few rebellions of maritime provinces have succeeded without acquiring sea power. — Samuel Eliot Morison

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

France and Germany were opposed to a maritime blockade of the Adriatic Sea without a mandate from the United Nations (UN). So, what we witnessed in Kosovo was an extraordinary war, a war waged solely with bombs from the air. — Paul Virilio

You don't need to buy a $7 billion company to penetrate maritime security. The Mafia doesn't buy FedEx to smuggle. — James Carafano

English policy may not yet have made the definite decision to attack us; but it doubtless wishes, by all and every means, even the most extreme, to hinder every further expansion of German international influence and of German maritime power. — Bernhard von Bulow

Portugal is not doing well economically. People are upset and angry. You can feel it on the street. You can tell in the way they drive. We're talking about one of the richest histories. We had an unbelievable empire, and so many maritime discoveries, and how is it that we are now reduced to this? But I still love the country. — Daniela Ruah

There's a lot of sanctions left that we can start to do, whether it's with oil, whether it's with energy, whether it's with their maritime ships, exports, we can do a lot of different things that we haven't done yet. What we have to do is send a strong, unified message to North Korea that this nuclear tests unacceptable. And I think the international community do that. — Nikki Haley

We're seeing China push very hard in its immediate neighborhood, particularly in the maritime zone surrounding China, to kind of create a security zone for itself, trying to lock in the territorial and maritime gains that it can now, before a period of much more difficult choices arises some time in the 2020s. — Howard W. French

This accession of territory affirms forever the power of the United States, and I have given England a maritime rival who sooner or later will humble her pride. — Napoleon Bonaparte

It is a golden chapter in the history of India's maritime security. May INS Vikramaditya, imbibe the radiance of the sun and confidence of victory in each one of us. — Narendra Modi

I lived for a long time under vast porticos That maritime suns tinted with a thousand fires, And whose great pillars, straight and majestuous In the evening made seem like basaltic caves. — Charles Baudelaire

The wide difference between the two characters, the slowness and want of energy of the Spartans as contrasted with the dash and enterprise of their opponents, proved of the greatest service, especially to a maritime empire like Athens. Indeed this was shown by the Syracusans, who were most like the Athenians in character, and also most successful in combating them. — Thucydides

The cooperation of navies from around the world promises high tactical value for the ships, aircraft, and divers involved; while demonstrating international resolve in defending maritime security against potential threats. — John C. Stennis

As soon as I finished the Russian course, I was sent to Korea with the task of trying to establish an agent network, a network in the so called maritime provinces. — Sayings

That Alaska has a very narrow maritime border between a foreign country, Russia, and on our other side, the land boundary that we have with - Canada. We have trade missions back and forth. We - we do - it's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America where - where do they go? It's Alaska. — Sarah Palin

If a single act of folly was more responsible for this explosion than any other it was the arbitrary and dangerous announced decision that the Straits of Tiran would be closed. The right of innocent, maritime passage must be preserved for all nations — Lyndon B. Johnson

It is too often forgotten that when the Europeans gained enough maritime skills and gunpowder to conquer most of the world, they not only colonized the bulk of the world's people but they colonized the interpretation of history itself. Human history was rewritten to favor them at the expense of other people. The roots of modern racism can be traced to this conquest and colonization. — John Henrik Clarke

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