Quotes
"You do not ask a tame seagull why it needs to disappear from time to time toward the open sea. It goes, that's all."
"Man is always the strongest." (--after having to bend his steel bowsprit back, after collision, alone and unassisted during the Golden Globe race.)
"I am a citizen of the most beautiful nation on earth. A nation whose laws are harsh yet simple, a nation that never cheats, which is immense and without borders, where life is lived in the present. In this limitless nation, this nation of wind, light, and peace, there is no other ruler besides the sea."
"I no longer know how far I have got, except that we long ago left the borders of too much behind." (--just before passing Cape Horn for the second time.)
"I wonder. Plymouth so close, barely 10,000 miles to the north...but leaving from Plymouth and returning to Plymouth now seems like leaving from nowhere to go nowhere." (--after rounding the Horn in the Golden Globe race.)
"My real log is written in the sea and sky; the sails talking with the rain and the stars amid the sounds of the sea, the silences full of secret things between my boat and me, like the times I spent as a child listening to the forest talk." (--from "The Long Way")
"The geography of the sailor is not always the one of the cartographer, for whom a cape is a cape with its longitude and latitude. For the sailor, a great cape is both very simple and extremely complex, with rocks, currents, furling seas, beautiful oceans, good winds and gusts, moments of happiness and of fright, fatigue, dreams, aching hands, an empty stomach, marvelous minutes and sometimes suffering. A great cape, for us, cannot be translated only into a latitude and a longitude. A great cape has a soul, with shadows and colors, very soft, very violent. A soul as smooth as that of a child, as hard as that of a criminal." (--from "The Long Way")
Read more about this topic: Bernard Moitessier
Famous quotes containing the word quotes:
“A great man quotes bravely, and will not draw on his invention when his memory serves him with a word as good. What he quotes, he fills with his own voice and humour, and the whole cyclopedia of his table-talk is presently believed to be his own.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I quote another man’s saying; unluckily, that other withdraws himself in the same way, and quotes me.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say “I think,” “I am,” but quotes some saint or sage.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)