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Shipwreck Quotes

Shipwreck Quotes by Guy de Maupassant, Henry Ward Beecher, Napoleon Bonaparte, Lauren Oliver, Jane Hamilton, William Shakespeare and many others.

Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship’s captain has to avoid a shipwreck.
Guy de Maupassant
We need not fear shipwreck when God is the pilot.
Henry Ward Beecher
Love is the occupation of the idle man, the amusement of a busy one, and the shipwreck of a sovereign.
Napoleon Bonaparte
We’ll go.” Her voice is surprisingly deep and forceful. Set in her sunken, shipwreck face, her eyes burn like two smoldering coals. “We’ll fight.
Lauren Oliver
There is so much inherent drama in the matter of change. Disappointment in yourself and others, coping with the fact that life is essentially shipwreck, becoming a person you yourself could not imagine yourself to be, for good and for bad, and then ultimately there is the basic matter of loss.
Jane Hamilton
Her virtues, graced with external gifts, Do breed love’s settled passions in my heart; And like as rigour of tempestuous gusts Provokes the mightiest hulk against the tide, So am I driven by breath of her renown Either to suffer shipwreck or arrive Where I may have fruition of her love.
William Shakespeare
Men will tell you sometimes that “money’s hard.” That shows it was not made to eat, I say…. Some of those who sank with the steamer the other day found out that money was heavy too.
Henry David Thoreau
Adventurous men enjoy shipwrecks, mutinies, earthquakes, conflagrations, and all kinds of unpleasant experiences. They say to themselves, for example, ‘So this is what an earthquake is like,’ and it gives them pleasure to have their knowledge of the world increased by this new item.
Bertrand Russell
When I die, it will be a shipwreck, and as when a huge ship sinks, many people all around will be sucked down with it.
Pablo Picasso
The Church had the words reason and liberty on her lips when the inalienable rights of the human race were threatened with shipwreck.
Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
In a very real sense, we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet, even in a shipwreck, human decencies and human values do not necessarily vanish, and we must make the most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a manner to which we may look forward as worthy of our dignity.
Norbert Wiener
The sceptic, when he plunges into the depths of infidelity, like the miser who leaps from the shipwreck, will find that the treasures which he bears about him will only sink him deeper in the abyss.
Charles Caleb Colton
He wrongly accuses Neptune, who makes shipwreck a second time.
Publilius Syrus
In the name of God, Monsieur, let us have greater confidence in Him than we do; let us allow Him to steer our little bark; if it is useful and pleasing to Him, He will save it from shipwreck.
Vincent de Paul
Or shipwrecked, kindles on the coast False fires, that others may be lost.
William Wordsworth
One can make one’s life a complete misery, worrying about burglaries and shipwrecks, but ask anyone, anyone you know … earth-shattering disasters and fabulous inheritances all seems to take place exclusively in the newspapers.
Jean Anouilh
‎Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.
Voltaire
The channel is known only to the natives; so that if any stranger should enter into the bay without one of their pilots he would run great danger of shipwreck.
Thomas More
Methinks I am like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escap’d shipwreck in passing a small frith, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe under these disadvantageous circumstances.
David Hume
The best way to meet a woman is in an emergency situation – if you’re in a shipwreck, or you find yourself behind enemy lines, or in a flood.
Mark Helprin
I’d heard about a shipwreck that was never found – John Paul Jones’ Bonhomme Richard. So I thought, ‘Well, I’ll go look for it.’
Clive Cussler
All I’d ever wanted was to forget. but even when I thought I had, pieces had kept emerging, like bits of wood floating up to the surface that only hint at the shipwreck below.
Sarah Dessen
Jane Austen can in fact get more drama out of morality than most other writers can get from shipwreck, battle, murder, or mayhem.
Ronald Blythe
An old man said, We are not condemned because of our thoughts that enter us, but because we use our thoughts badly; our thoughts can cause us either to suffer shipwreck or to be crowned.
Poemen
Like a shipwreck or a jetty, almost anything that forms a structure in the ocean, whether it is natural or artificial over time, collects life.
Sylvia Earle
When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them.
Willa Cather
O, I have suffered
With those that I saw suffer!
William Shakespeare
Shipwreck in youth is sorrowful enough, but one looks for storms at the spring equinox. Yet it is the September equinox that drowns.
Helen Waddell
Every gazette brings accounts of the untutored freaks of the wind,–shipwrecks and hurricanes which the mariner and planter acceptas special or general providences; but they touch our consciences, they remind us of our sins. Another deluge would disgrace mankind.
Henry David Thoreau
I’ve been canyoning, snorkelled a shipwreck, and learnt to Irish dance, all in the same week.
Ashley Roberts
Today, there is a whole generation of Christian men who are laughing at things that ought to make them weep, and not a few of them will suffer shipwreck, and some-the loss of their souls. Let the indiscriminate viewer beware.
R. Kent Hughes
But it ain’t our feelings we have to steer by through life–no, no, we’d make shipwreck mighty often if we did that. There’s only the one safe compass and we’ve got to set our course by that–what it’s right to do.
Lucy Maud Montgomery
The man who has experienced shipwreck shudders even at a calm sea.
Ovid
Lovers of literature will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism.
Josef Skvorecky
Art is like a shipwreck; it’s every man for himself.
Marcel Duchamp
The only sea I saw Was the seesaw sea With you riding on it. Lie down, lie easy. Let me shipwreck in your thighs.
Dylan Thomas
If one tries to navigate unknown waters one runs the risk of shipwreck
Albert Einstein
Well, father, in the shipwreck of life, for life is an eternal shipwreck of our hopes, I cast into the sea my useless encumbrance, that is all, and I remain with my own will, disposed to live perfectly alone, and, consequently, perfectly free. (Eugenie to her father)
Alexandre Dumas
I’d always felt like I was going to take part in adventures in my life. That’s what led me to diving in the shipwreck to begin with. But when you’re faced with your own demise, you have to accept that you are vulnerable and that you are only here for a set period of time.
Phil Keoghan
Don’t let us rejoice in punishment, even when the hand of God alone inflicts it. The best of us are but poor wretches, just saved from shipwreck. Can we feel anything but awe and pity when we see a fellow-passenger swallowed by the waves?
George Eliot
Birth is a shipwreck, the mewling infant shored on unknown land.
Jeanette Winterson
Voyaging begins when one burns one’s boats, adventures begin with a shipwreck.
Michel Serres
If we once get above our Bibles and cease making the written Word of God our sole rule both as to faith and practice, we shall soon lie open to all manner of delusion and be in great danger of making shipwreck of faith and a good conscience.
George Whitefield
I’m very resourceful. I’d be good in prison. I’d be good in a shipwreck. I’d make a great hostage.
David Letterman
Often it’s just a short swim from the shipwreck of your life to the island paradise of your dreams, assuming you don’t drown in the metaphor.
Robert Breault
Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in the deep waters of our minds like shipwrecks on the sea bed.
J. G. Ballard
… the passion for popularity brings such injury upon those it masters that it shipwrecks faith itself. Our Lord confirms this when He says, ‘How can you have faith in Me when you receive honour from one another and do not seek for the honour that comes from the only God?’ (cf. Jn. 5:44).
Gregory Palamas
Life is a shipwreck but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.
Voltaire
Old age is a shipwreck.
Charles de Gaulle
My daughter,” I said blankly. “I see. Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought it took a man, as well as a woman, to make a child. Is this infant’s father to be a crab, or a seagull maybe? Or were you planning to shipwreck some likely sailor on my doorstep, so I can make convenient use of him?
Juliet Marillier