75 Ocean Quotes That Inspire Wonder and Reflection

The ocean is as mysterious as it is beautiful. We may swim and play on its surface, but we know so little about what truly lies beneath. It’s no wonder that ocean quotes have been such a source of awe and inspiration for some of the most influential thinkers of our time!

Whether you’re looking to spark a class discussion, add depth to a writing prompt, or find inspiration for your bulletin board, we’ve put together a list of ocean quotes you’ll love. Dive in and discover how the ocean has shaped the thoughts of some of the greatest minds in history.

Ocean Quotes by Writers

How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is clearly Ocean. — Arthur C. Clarke

The vast sage desert undulates with almost imperceptible tides like the oceans. — Frank Waters

For all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Who heeds the waste abyss of possibility? The ocean is everywhere the same, but it has no character until seen with the shore or the ship. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

When one longs for a drink, it seems as though one could drink a whole ocean—that is faith; but when one begins to drink, one can only drink altogether two glasses—that is science. — Anton Chekhov

Music … is the vapor of art. It is to poetry what revery is to thought, what the fluid is to the liquid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves. — Victor Hugo

Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel? — Ernest Hemingway

The great depths of the ocean are entirely unknown to us. Soundings cannot reach them. — Jules Verne

Nothing is more disturbing to the mind than the contemplation of the diffusion of forces at work in the unfathomable and illimitable space of the ocean. — Victor Hugo

We do not associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always. — Henry David Thoreau

You are going to visit [talking of under the ocean] the fairyland of marvels. — Jules Verne

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red. — William Shakespeare

“It’s all like an ocean!” cried Dostoevsky. I say it’s all like cellophane. — Kurt Vonnegut

Friendship is a mysterious and ocean-bottom thing. Who can know the outer ranges of it? Perhaps no human being has ever explored its limits. — Zora Neale Hurston

A small craft in the ocean is, or should be, a benevolent dictatorship. The skipper’s brain is the vessel’s brain and he must give up his soul to her, regardless of his own feelings or inclinations. — Tristan Jones

Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships. — Zora Neale Hurston

O soul, be changed into little waterdrops,
And fall into the ocean—ne’er to be found.
My God! my God! look not so fierce on me! — Christopher Marlowe

Open all your pores and bathe in all the tides of nature, in all her streams and oceans, at all seasons. — Henry David Thoreau

Love is an element which though physically unseen is as real as air or water. It is an acting, living, moving force … it moves in waves and currents like those of the ocean. — Prentice Mulford

Ocean Quotes by Poets and Lyricists

When the ocean surges, don’t let me just hear it. Let it splash inside my chest! — Rumi

Can ye fathom the ocean, dark and deep, where the mighty waves and the grandeur sweep? — Fanny Crosby

When water gets caught in habitual whirlpools, dig a way out through the bottom of the ocean. — Rumi

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good. — W.H. Auden

Now from the smooth deep ocean-stream the sun
Began to climb the heavens, and with new rays
Smote the surrounding fields. — Homer

Give up to grace. The ocean takes care of each wave ’til it gets to shore. You need more help than you know. — Rumi

The smallest effort is not lost,
Each wavelet on the ocean tost
Aids in the ebb-tide or the flow;
Each rain-drop makes some floweret blow;
Each struggle lessens human woe. — Charles Mackay

For God the whole created mass inspires:
Through heaven and earth and ocean’s depth he throws
His influence round, and kindles as he goes. — Virgil

Love rests on no foundation.
It is an endless ocean,
with no beginning or end. — Rumi

How to sustain the miracle
Of being, that like a muted bell,
Or like some ocean-breathing shell,
Quivers, intense and still? — Babette Deutsch

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin—his control
Stops with the shore. — Lord Byron

Late, by myself, in the boat of myself, no light and no land anywhere, cloudcover thick. I try to stay just above the surface, yet I’m already under and living within the ocean. — Rumi

All that we do
Is touched with ocean, yet we remain
On the shore of what we know. — Richard Wilbur

The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air. — Thomas Gray

You’re calmer than the seals in the Arctic Ocean
At least they flap their fins to express emotion. — Dorothy Fields

To a frog that’s never left his pond, the ocean seems like a gamble. Look what he’s giving up: security, mastery of his world, recognition! — Rumi

In the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get, the easier the sinking. — James Russell Lowell

Surely oak and threefold brass surrounded his heart who first trusted a frail vessel to the merciless ocean. — Horace

The waters were his winding sheet, the sea was made for his tomb;
Yet for his fame the ocean sea, was not sufficient room. — Richard Barnfield

Ocean Quotes by Philosophers

An age will come after many years when the Ocean will loose the chains of things, and a huge land lie revealed; when Tiphys will disclose new worlds and Thule no more be the ultimate. — Seneca the Younger

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

Mother is the home we come from.
She is nature, soil, ocean. — Erich Fromm

The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms. — Bruno Latour

As the great ocean has but one taste, that of salt, so has this Dharma and Discipline but one taste, the taste of Freedom. — Pāli Canon

Ocean Quotes by World Leaders and Other Notable Figures

If you wish to avoid foreign collision, you had better abandon the ocean. — Henry Clay

We know that to wage a nuclear war today, for example, would be a form of suicide; or that to pollute the air or the oceans in order to achieve some short-term benefit would be to destroy the very basis for our survival. — Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

The ocean … like the air, is the common birth-right of mankind. — Thomas Jefferson

Knowledge of the oceans is more than a matter of curiosity. Our very survival may hinge upon it. — John F. Kennedy

Knowledge—it excites prejudices to call it science—is advancing as irresistibly, as majestically, as remorselessly as the ocean moves in upon the shore. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

If God is vast and boundless as the ocean, how can a tiny drop like man imagine what He is? — Mahatma Gandhi

We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But if that drop was not in the ocean, I think the ocean would be less because of that missing drop. I do not agree with the big way of doing things. — Mother Teresa

As soon as we become one with the ocean in the shape of God, there is no more rest for us, nor indeed do we need rest any longer. — Mahatma Gandhi

Did I not say to you a little while ago that the universe swam in an ocean of similitudes and analogies? — Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

The great obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the ocean was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. — Daniel J. Boorstin

Ocean Quotes by Scientists

Man has within him the lake of the blood where the lungs rise and fall in breathing, so likewise the body of the earth has its oceans which also rise and fall in consequence of the world’s breathing. — Leonardo da Vinci

Pouring forth its seas everywhere, then, the ocean envelops the earth and fills its deeper chasms. — Nicolaus Copernicus

It is not easy to measure the ocean, but we can be measured by it, confront it, and be in it. — Terence McKenna

We know less about the ocean’s bottom than about the moon’s back side. — Roger Revelle

Men might as well project a voyage to the moon as attempt to employ steam navigation against the stormy North Atlantic Ocean. — Dionysius Lardner

The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever. — Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Ocean Quotes From Pop Culture

I wonder if the ocean smells different on the other side of the world. — J.A. Redmerski

The ocean is an intoxicant or more like WD40. It greases the rusty parts of the mind and body and gets them moving like a precision machine. — Michael Scott Gallegos

Seeing death as the end of life is like seeing the horizon as the end of the ocean. — Doc Searls

I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me. — Pat Conroy

The never-ceasing boom of the great ocean as it breaks on the beach drowns all smaller sounds. — Alexander Maclaren

The ocean was the best place, of course. That was what she loved most. It was a feeling of freedom like no other, and yet a feeling of communion with all the other places and creatures the water touched. — Ann Brashares

Faith is knowing there is an ocean because you have seen a brook. — William Arthur Ward

… the ocean kept falling into itself, gathering itself up, and falling into itself again. — Erica Jong

Our life is but a grain of sand in the indifferent ocean of infinity. — Sergei Dovlatov

The Pacific Ocean was a body of water surrounded on all sides by elephantiasis and other dread diseases. — Joseph Heller

Water is the formless potential out of which creation emerged. It is the ocean of unconsciousness enveloping the islands of consciousness. — Scott Sanders

How many whales do we really need? I figure five. One for each ocean. — Denis Leary

I said, I prefer the ocean when it’s gray. Or not really gray. A pale, in-between color. It reminds me of waiting for something good to happen. — Lauren Oliver

Dive deep into the ocean, Sita, and you will find that the greatest treasures you find are the illusions you leave behind. — Christopher Pike

It was like trying to bail out an ocean of water with a teaspoon. — Jodi Picoult

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