Shipwreck Quotes - Page 4

• He comes to us in the brokenness of our health, in the shipwreck of our family lives, in the loss of all possible peace of mind, even in the very thick of our sins. He saves us in our disasters, not from them. He emphatically does not promise to meet only the odd winner of the self-improvement lottery. He meets us all in our endless and inescapable losing.

  Robert Farrar Capon

  Loss, Self, Promise

  Robert Farrar Capon (1996). “The Astonished Heart: Reclaiming the Good News from the Lost-and-found of Church History”, p.15, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• 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

  Moving On, Break Up, Stay Strong

  Sarah Dessen (2006). “Just Listen: A Novel”, Viking Childrens Books

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• 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

  Men, Earthquakes, Giving

  Bertrand Russell (2012). “The Conquest of Happiness”, p.114, Routledge

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• 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

  Prison, Be Good, Hostage

  "David Letterman's 1984 Playboy Interview. A Candid Conversation with the Comedy Genius In His Youth". Playboy Interview, playboysfw.kinja.com. 1984.

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• Accordingly, death is a harbor of peace for the just, but is believed a shipwreck for the wicked.

  Ambrose

  Sympathy, Wicked, Harbors

  "De bono mortis" by Ambrose, 8, 31, 387-391.

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• 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

  Spring, Storm, Looks

  Helen Waddell (1965). “Peter Abelard”

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• 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

  Real, Looks, May

  Norbert Wiener (1988). “The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society”, p.40, Da Capo Press

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• ... overconfidence in one's own ability is the root of much evil. Vanity, egoism, is the deadliest of all characteristics. This vanity, combined with extreme ignorance of conditions the knowledge of which is the very A B C of business and of life, produces more shipwrecks and heartaches than any other part of our mental make-up.

  Alice Foote MacDougall

  Business, Ignorance, Roots

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• Warm are the still and lucky miles, White shores of longing stretch away, A light of recognition fills The whole great day, and bright The tiny world of lovers' arms. Silence invades the breathing wood Where drowsy limbs a treasure keep, Now greenly falls the learned shade Across the sleeping brows And stirs their secret to a smile. Restored! Returned! The lost are borne On seas of shipwreck home at last: See! In a fire of praising burns The dry dumb past, and we Our life-day long shall part no more.

  W. H. Auden

  Fall, Sleep, Home

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• 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

  Faith, Names, Littles

  Saint Vincent de Paul, Pierre Coste (1993). “Correspondence, Conferences, Documents: Apr. 1650-July 1653”, New City Pr

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• 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

  Drama, Battle, Facts

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• Plain experience and common sense inform us that no abstract Person can have made us as we are without also wishing to delete us and start over (Gen. 8:21; Zeph. 1:2). Therefore, the existence of cruel and arbitrary nature, together with the universality of human sin, prevents us from beginning the theological enterprise with any concept of God that is distinct from revelation. All theologies of a cosmic harmonic principle shipwreck on the truths of tragedy, catastrophe, and injustice.

  Paul F. M. Zahl

  Common Sense, Starting Over, Together

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• 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

  Punishment, Hands, Wave

  George Eliot (1869). “Silas Marner and Scenes of Clerical Life”, p.311

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• 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

  Ambition, Men, Thinking

  David Hume (2016). “A Treatise of Human Nature: Revision of Great Book”, p.248, VM eBooks

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• 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

  Christian, Loss, Men

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• Most days I feel like the sole survivor of a shipwreck, rowing my paddleboat across a sea of people on waves made of an infinite array of hands and crests that reveal anonymous faces. On a good day, the clouds part to alight on-lo and behold-an island! I step ashore, only find that it too is made of people, mangled bodies somehow still alive. They grab at my feet, pulling me under like quicksand. The last thing I see before suffocating is the sky, a billion eyes staring down, blinking in undulating electric ripples. The cold rain I feel on my cheeks is the tears of the people.

  Richard M. Nixon

  Rain, Good Day, Eye

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• It has been said that men carry on a kind of coasting trade with religion. In the voyage of life, they profess to be in search of heaven, but take care not to venture so far in their approximations to it, as entirely to lose sight of the earth; and should their frail vessel be in danger of shipwreck, they will gladly throw their darling vices overboard, as other mariners their treasures, only to fish them up again when the storm is over.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Men, Sight, Heaven

  Charles Caleb Colton (1823). “Remarks on the Talents of Lord Byron and the Tendencies of Don Juan”, p.97

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• 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

  Rights, Race, Church

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• Does it seem all but incredible to you that intelligence should travel for two thousand miles, along those slender copper lines, far down in the all but fathomless Atlantic; never before penetrated … save when some foundering vessel has plunged with her hapless company to the eternal silence and darkness of the abyss? Does it seem … but a miracle … that the thoughts of living men … should burn over the cold, green bones of men and women, whose hearts, once as warm as ours, burst as the eternal gulfs closed and roared over them centuries ago?

  Edward Everett

  Travel, Ocean, Heart

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• 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

  Infidelity, Depth, Treasure

  Charles Caleb Colton (1836). “Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.109

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• If that marvellous microcosm, man, with all the costly cargo of his faculties and powers, were indeed a rich argosy, fitted out and freighted only for shipwreck and destruction, who amongst us that tolerate the present only from the hope of the future, who that have any aspirings of a high and intellectual nature about them, could be brought to submit to the disgusting mortifications of the voyage?

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Future, Men, Intellectual

  Charles Caleb Colton (1823). “Remarks on the Talents of Lord Byron and the Tendencies of Don Juan”

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• Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night, Brother to Death, in silent darkness born, Relieve my languish and restore the light; With dark forgetting of my care return. And let the day be time enough to mourn The shipwreck of my ill adventured youth: Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn Without the torment of the night's untruth.

  Samuel Daniel

  Brother, Time, Sleep

  'Sonnets to Delia' (1592) no. 54

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• 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

  Wind, Special, Hurricanes

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.1025, Delphi Classics

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• All legitimate government is a mutual insurance company, voluntarily agreed upon by the parties to it, for the protection of their rights against wrong-doers. In its voluntary character it is precisely similar to an association for mutual protection against fire or shipwreck.

  Lysander Spooner

  Party, Character, Fire

  Lysander Spooner (2004). “An Essay on the Trial by Jury”, p.242, The Minerva Group, Inc.

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• Some places speak distinctly. Certain dark gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Dark, Garden, House

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