Sailing Alone around the World Quotes

“I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone around the World

“Now, it it well known that one cannot step on a tack without saying something about it.”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone around the World

“...as the day wore on I watched the birds all flying in one direction, and said, "Land lies there.”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone around the World

“I grasped her gunwale and held on as she turned bottom up, for I suddenly remembered that I could not swim.”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World

“I had resolved on a voyage around the world, and as the wind on the morning of April 24, 1895, was fair, at noon I weighed anchor, set sail, and filled away from Boston, where the Spray had been moored snugly all winter. The twelve-o’clock whistles were blowing just as the sloop shot ahead under full sail. A”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World

“for what is a man in a storm like this?”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World

“You must then know the sea, and know that you know it, and not forget that it was made to be sailed over.”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World

“advice from any one, for I had a right to my own opinions in matters pertaining to the sea. That the best of sailors might do worse than even I alone was borne in upon me not a league from Boston docks, where a great steamship, fully manned, officered, and piloted, lay stranded and broken. This was the Venetian. She was broken completely in two over a ledge. So in the first hour of my lone voyage I had proof that the Spray could at least do better than this full-handed steamship, for I was already farther on my voyage than she. "Take warning, Spray, and have a care," I uttered”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World

“The sea was confused and treacherous. In such a time as this the old fisherman prayed, 'Remember Lord, my ship is small and thy sea is so wide.”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World

“There are no poetry enshrined freighters on the sea now. It is a prosy life when we have no time to bid one another good morning.”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World

“I found no fault with the cook, and it was the rule of the voyage that the cook found no fault with me. There was never a ship’s crew so well agreed.”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World

“I was just saying, "Now I lay me," when I was seized by a determination to try yet once more, so that no one of the prophets of evil I had left behind me could say, "I told you so.”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World

“But where, after all, would be the poetry of the sea were there no wild waves?”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World

“I suddenly remembered that I could not swim.”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World

“The officers who are over-sure, and "know it all like a book," are the ones, I have observed, who wreck the most ships and lose the most lives.”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing alone around the world: A voyage beyond imagination

“They have great reason to love their country and to fear the white man's yoke, for once harnessed to the plow, their life would no longer be a poem.”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing alone around the world: A voyage beyond imagination

“It was the 13th of the month, and 13 is my lucky number”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing alone around the world: A voyage beyond imagination

“I knew now that I had put a world behind me, and that I was opening out another world ahead. I had passed the haunts of savages. Great piles of granite mountains of bleak and lifeless aspect were now astern ;”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World