We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.
~Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732

A lake carries you into recesses of feeling otherwise impenetrable.
~William Wordsworth

A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.
~Henry David Thoreau

The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out.
~Annie Dillard

The true peace of God begins at any spot a thousand miles from the nearest land.
~Joseph Conrad

Never a ship sails out of the bayBut carries my heart as a stowaway.
~Roselle Mercier Montgomery, The Stowaway

Water flows uphill towards money.
~Anonymous, saying in the American West, quoted by Ivan Doig in Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 1986

I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man.
~Henry David Thoreau

The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea.
~Isak Dinesen

Filthy water cannot be washed.
~African Proverb

Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war.
~Loren Eiseley

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me),It's always our self we find in the sea.
~e.e. cummings

Most of us, I suppose, are a little nervous of the sea. No matter what its smiles may be, we doubt its friendship.
~H.M. Tomlinson

The only cure for seasickness is to sit on the shady side of an old brick church in the country.
~Author Unknown

Though inland far we be,Our souls have sight of that immortal seaWhich brought us hither.
~William Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality

Ocean: A body of water occupying two-thirds of a world made for man - who has no gills.
~Ambrose Bierce

I find myself at the extremity of a long beach. How gladly does the spirit leap forth, and suddenly enlarge its sense of being to the full extent of the broad, blue, sunny deep! A greeting and a homage to the Sea! I descend over its margin, and dip my hand into the wave that meets me, and bathe my brow. That far-resounding roar is the Ocean's voice of welcome. His salt breath brings a blessing along with it.
~Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Foot-prints on the Sea-shore"

The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
~Joseph Conrad

Praise the sea; on shore remain.
~John Florio

Rivers are roads which move, and which carry us whither we desire to go.
~Blaise Pascal

The great sea makes one a great sceptic.
~Richard Jefferies

And thou, vast ocean! on whose awful faceTime's iron feet can print no ruin-trace.
~Robert Montgomery, The Omnipresence of the Deity

Why do we love the sea? It is because it has some potent power to make us think things we like to think.
~Robert Henri

Keep your feet on the deck, your hands on the tiller, your eyes on the horizon and your beer in the fridge!
~B.E. Marshall

I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it raging and roaring like a wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free and ending just where it began.
~William Hazlitt

There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates.
~James Russell Lowell

The lakes are something which you are unprepared for; they lie up so high, exposed to the light, and the forest is diminished to a fine fringe on their edges, with here and there a blue mountain, like amethyst jewels set around some jewel of the first water, - so anterior, so superior, to all the changes that are to take place on their shores, even now civil and refined, and fair as they can ever be.
~Henry David Thoreau

What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.
~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

A person should go out on the water on a fine day to a small distance from a beautiful coast, if he would see Nature really smile. Never does she look so delightful, as when the sun is brightly reflected by the water, while the waves are gently rippling, and the prospect receives life and animation from the glancing transit of an occasional row-boat, and the quieter motion of a few small vessels. But the land must be well in sight; not only for its own sake, but because the immensity and awfulness of a mere sea-view would ill accord with the other parts of the glittering and joyous scene.
~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

There is indeed, perhaps, no better way to hold communion with the sea than sitting in the sun on the veranda of a fishermen's cafe.
~Joseph W. Beach

He that will learn to pray, let him go to sea.
~George Herbert

The sea hath no king but God alone.
~Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The White Ship