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C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Ships

The true ship is the ship builder.

Emerson.

  • And let our barks across the pathless flood
  • Hold different courses.
  • Scott.

    Ships, dim discovered, dropping from the clouds.

    Thomson.

  • Like ships that have gone down at sea,
  • When heaven was all tranquillity.
  • Moore.

    And the wind plays on those great sonorous harps, the shrouds and masts of ships.

    Longfellow.

    Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.

    Samuel Johnson.

  • Ships that sailed for sunny isles,
  • But never came to shore.
  • Thos. Hervey.

  • She walks the waters like a thing of life,
  • And seems to dare the elements to strife.
  • Byron.

  • She bears her down majestically near,
  • Speed on her prow, and terror in her tier.
  • Byron.

  • A rotten carcass of a boat, not rigged,
  • Nor tackle, sail, nor mast; the very rats
  • Instinctively have quit it.
  • Shakespeare.

  • There’s not a ship that sails the ocean,
  • But every climate, every soil,
  • Must bring its tribute, great or small,
  • And help to build the wooden wall!
  • Longfellow.

  • Build me straight, O worthy Master!
  • Staunch and strong, a goodly vessel
  • That shall laugh at all disaster,
  • And with wave and whirlwind wrestle!
  • Longfellow.

  • And the stately ships go on
  • To their haven under the hill;
  • But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand,
  • And the sound of a voice that is still.
  • Tennyson.

  • Behold the threaden sails,
  • Borne with the invisible and creeping wind,
  • Draw the huge bottoms through the furrow’d sea,
  • Breasting the lofty surge.
  • Shakespeare.

  • Heaven speed the canvas, gallantly unfurl’d,
  • To furnish and accommodate a world,
  • To give the Pole the produce of the sun,
  • And knit th’ unsocial climates into one.
  • Cowper.

  • Upon the gale she stoop’d her side,
  • And bounded o’er the swelling tide,
  • As she were dancing home;
  • The merry seamen laugh’d to see
  • Their gallant ship so lustily
  • Furrow the green-sea foam.
  • Scott.

  • The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d thorne,
  • Burn’d on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
  • Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
  • The winds were love-sick with them: the oars were silver,
  • Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
  • The water which they beat to follow faster,
  • As amorous of their strokes.
  • Shakespeare.