Ocean

Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time. - H. P. Lovecraft

This is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers this morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you might find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.- Joseph Campbell

The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises.- Sigmund Freud

Either you decide to stay in the shallow end of the pool or you go out in the ocean.- Christopher Reeve

Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.- Saint Augustine

Kierkegaard's torment was the direct result of seeing the world as it really is in relation to his situation as a creature. The prison of one's character is painstakingly built to deny one thing and one thing alone: one's creatureliness. The creatureliness is the terror. Once admit that you are a defecating creature and you invite the primeval ocean of creature anxiety to flood over you. But it is more than creature anxiety, it is also man's anxiety, the anxiety that results from the human paradox that man is an animal who is conscious of his animal limitation. Anxiety is the result of the percep tion of the truth of one's condition. What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self- expression—and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax, which is why one type of cultural man rebels openly against the idea of God. What kind of deity would create such complex and fancy worm food? - Ernest Becker

We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch - we are going back from whence we came. - John F. Kennedy

What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.― Werner Herzog

Note; the three photos below were taken by my father and myself (last two) respectively.  The first is near Madagascar, the second near Broome (Western Australia) and the third is Jeffrey's Bay (Eastern Cape, South Africa).

The populace is like the sea, motionless in itself, but stirred by every wind, even the lightest breeze.

Book XXVIII, sec. 27 (History of Rome)

 “It would be good to live in a perpetual state of leave-taking, never to go nor to stay, but to remain suspended in that golden emotion of love and longing; to be loved without satiety.” ― John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez

“Let him think that I am more man than I am and I will be so.” ― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea