Oar Quotes & Sayings

If you work by reason, you grow rough-edged; if you choose to dip your oar into sentiment's stream, it will sweep you away. Demanding your own way only serves to constrain you. However you look at it, the human world is not an easy place to live.

And when its difficulties intensify, you find yourself longing to leave that world and dwell in some easier one--and then, when you understand at last that difficulties will dog you wherever you may live, this is when poetry and art are born. — Soseki Natsume

What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in! — Gustave Flaubert

I was lost
And sang my broken-down songs in the hell of the hour.
Then in my heart moved an oar,
And I was found by a breeze from a door in the sea of forms
And was rowed to the cherry trees on the shore. — Stan Rice

They teach us that in school, matters of principle. I swear it's a plot to get us all slaughtered the day they graduate us out the door. It's their revenge, see? Here we are reading books in literature class about some banana who's only got one oar in the water to start with, and then he pops it out worrying about principles. — Guy Vanderhaeghe

Consider that you radiate. At all times. Consider that what you're feeling right now is rippling outward into a field of is-ness that anyone can dip their oar into. You are felt. You are heard. You are seen. If you were not here, the world would be different. Because of your presence, the universe is expanding. — Danielle LaPorte

Then the coxswain called out, 'Ready all!' Joe turned and faced the rear of the boat, slid his seat forward, sank the white blade of his oar into the oil-black water, tensed his muscles, and waited for the command that would propel him forward into the glimmering darkness. — Daniel James Brown

He that embarks on the voyage of life will always wish to advance rather by the impulse of the wind than the strokes of the oar; and many fold in their passage; while they lie waiting for the gale. — Samuel Johnson

Don't want to slump over the oars. — James Genn

Strangers have crossed the sound, but not the sound of the dark oarsmen Or the golden-haired sons of kings, Strangers whose thought is not formed to the cadence of waves, Rhythm of the sickle, oar and milking pail — Kathleen Raine

Baccarat is a game whereby the croupier gathers in money with a flexible sculling oar, then rakes it home. If I could have borrowed his oar I would have stayed. — Mark Twain

Oh swiftly glides the bonnie boat, Just parted from the shore, And to the fisher's chorus-note Soft moves the dipping oar. — Joanna Baillie

What's his story?' asked Yarvi.
'I don't know his name. Nothing, we all call him. When I was first brought to the South Wind he pulled an oar. One night, off the coast of Gettland, he tried to escape. Somehow he got free of his chain and stole a knife. He killed three guards and cut another's knee so he never walked again, and he gave our captain that scar before she and Trigg put a stop to him.'
Yarvi blinked at the shambling scrubber. 'All that with a knife?'
'And not a large one. — Joe Abercrombie

In the city of flesh I travel without maps, a worried tourist: and Ottilie was a very Venice. I stumbled lost in the blue shade of her pavements. Here was a dreamy stillness, a swaying, the splash of an oar. Then, when I least expected it, suddenly I stepped out into the great square, the sunlight, and she was a flock of birds scattering with soft cries in my arms. — John Banville

The joke was thinking you were ever really in charge of your life. You pressed your oar down into the water to direct the canoe, but it was the current that shot you through the rapids. You just hung on and hoped not to hit a rock or a whirlpool. — Scott Turow

If any pale student, glued to his desk, here seek an apology for a way of life whose natural fruits is that pallid and emasculate scholarship of which New England has had too many examples, it will be far better that this sketch had not been written. For the student there is, in its season, no better place than the saddle, and no better companion than the rifle or the oar. — Francis Parkman

I don't believe in just ordering people to do things. You have to sort of grab an oar and row with them. — Harold S. Geneen

When We That Wore the Myrtle Wear the Dust

When we that wore the myrtle wear the dust,
And years of darkness cover up our eyes,
And all our arrogant laughter and sweet lust
Keep counsel with the scruples of the wise;
When boys and girls that now are in the loins
Of croaking lads, dip oar into the sea, -
And who are these that dive for copper coins?
No longer we, my love, no longer we -
Then let the fortunate breathers of the air,
When we lie speechless in the muffling mould,
Tease not our ghosts with slander, pause not there
To say that love is false and soon grows cold,
But pass in silence the mute grave of two
Who lived and died believing love was true. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Within an hour, I had gone from anguish at the thought of losing him in Scotland, to a strong desire to bed him in the herbaceous borders, and from that to a pronounced urge to hit him on the head with an oar. Now I was back to tenderness. — Diana Gabaldon

To follow the drops sliding from a lifting oar, Head up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly shoreward ... — Theodore Roethke

Two people with mental issues in a relationship does not work. It's like sitting in a boat and neither one has an oar to row the other to shore. You can meet your mirror image in life, but that doesn't mean you should marry him. — Shannon L. Alder

Upon This Age, That Never Speaks Its Mind

Upon this age, that never speaks its mind,
This furtive age, this age endowed with power
To wake the moon with footsteps, fit an oar
Into the rowlocks of the wind, and find
What swims before his prow, what swirls behind -
Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric; undefiled
Proceeds pure Science, and has her say; but still
Upon this world from the collective womb
Is spewed all day the red triumphant child. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

White-crested waves crash on the shore. The masts sway violently, every which way. In the gray sky the gulls are circling like white flakes. Rain squalls blow past like gray slanting sails, and blue gaps open in the sky. The air brightens.
A cold silvery evening. The moon is overhead, and down below, in the water; and all around it-a wide frame of old, hammered, scaly silver. Etched on the silver-silent black fishing boats, tiny black needles of masts, little black men casting invisible lines into the silver. And the only sounds are the occasional plashing of an oar, the creaking of an oarlock, the springlike leap and flip-flop of a fish. ("The North") — Yevgeny Zamyatin

Past question, every experience is serviceable to us. Where got Ben-Hur the large hand and mighty grip which helped him now so well? Where but from the oar with which so long he fought the seas? And what was this spring of the floor under his feet to the dizzy lurch with which in the old time the trembling ship yielded to the beat of staggering billows, drunk with their power? So he kept his place, and gave the four free rein, and called to them in soothing voice, trying merely to guide them round the dangerous turn; and before the fever of the people began to abate, he had back the mastery. — Lew Wallace

Counting on each other became automatic. When I found a sweater in Texas I wanted, I learned to buy two, which was easier than seeing the look of disappointment on Caroline's face when I returned home with only one. When she went out from the boathouse on a windy day, she gave me her schedule in advance, which assuaged her worst-case scenario of flipping the boat, being hit on the head by an oar, and leaving Lucille stranded at home. I still have my set of keys to her house, to locks and doors that no longer exist, and I keep them in my glove compartment, where they have been moved from one car to another in the past couple of years. Someday I will throw them in the Charles, where I lost the seat to her boat and so much else. — Gail Caldwell

Only later I felt that poetry is like feeling another person lying next to you in the dark. Do you believe in poetry, in the spirit of poetry? I could see poetry in ballads, in the picture of the cathedral on the back of the postcard that my father sent my mother from London, in glaciers, peaks of mountains, river dust, Ian McEwan's covers of his books, cheap thrillers. Running gave me a gravitational pull. Running was my mother love. I was barefoot. There I was dressed in white. Matchstick legs. Hair standing up. I did not feel like a zero. I did not feel like a lost oar, unloved and unwanted, like a plant that needed water. A fleet of paper ships that needed to be mourned. I often felt homesick for the country of my mother. — Abigail George

Emma was now the captain of the ship, lending a sense of calm to the chaos of this hospitalization. T. S. Eliot sprang to mind: Damyata: The boat responded Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar The sea was calm, your heart would have responded Gaily, when invited, beating obedient To controlling hands — Paul Kalanithi

The sun shone on us, the water sparkled, the oar-blades dipped and we were gone. Gone to make history. — Bernard Cornwell

If you put your soul against the oar with me, the power that made the universe will enter your sinew from a source not outside of your limbs, but from a holy realm that lives within us. — Rumi

Quorum and group leaders should provide the leading voice and laboring oar in every ward and branch council regarding retention of converts. — D. Todd Christofferson

The judgment is an utensil proper for all subjects, and will have an oar in everything. — Michel De Montaigne

Remember Rio de Janeiro, the size of God's hand, sardines fleshed-open at the market, the way I entered you and moved inside? Looking down, is this the kind of density you can live with? What is the slightness of our bodies to stay, to be good at loving a second time? My mouth pretends it is an oar when it lives inside your mouth, but you are far away. — Stacie Cassarino

When I was taking my canoeing lessons I was given this oar to practice with, and I decided to have everyone sign it. All the cast and crew signed it and now I'm going to frame it. — Jared Gilman

She sent him a warm and gentle wind, and Lord Odysseus was happy as he set his sails to catch the breeze. He sat beside the steering oar and used his skill to steer the raft. — Homer

The Frenchman beside me had been dead since dawn. His scarred and shackled body swayed limply back and forth with every sweep of the great oar as we, his less fortunate bench-fellows, tugged and strained to keep time to the stroke. — Jeffery Farnol

Our human tragedy is that we are unable to comprehend our experience, it slips through our fingers, we can't hold on to it, and the more time passes, the harder it gets ... My father said that the natural world gave us explanations to compensate for the meanings we could not grasp. The slant of the cold sunlight on a winter pine, the music of water, an oar cutting the lake and the flight of birds, the mountains' nobility , the silence of the silence. We are given life but must accept that it is unattainable and rejoice in what can be held in the eye, the memory, the mind. — Salman Rushdie

There are no galley-slaves in the royal vessel of divine love - every man works his oar voluntarily! — Saint Francis De Sales

Carry an oar when you drive. Three times I've ended up in water. — Phyllis Diller

Learn of the little nautilus to sail, Spread the thin oar, and catch the driving gale. — Alexander Pope

Integrity Integrity is the ability to listen to a place inside oneself that doesn't change, even though the life that carries it may change. - RABBI JONATHAN OMER-MAN Much of our journey throughout this book has been about discovering that place inside and cultivating the ability to listen to it, while having compassion for the life that carries it. It moves me to share the story of a troubled man who, exhausted from his suffering and confusion, asked a sage for help. The sage looked deeply into the troubled man and with compassion offered him a choice: "You may have either a map or a boat." After looking at the many pilgrims about him, all of whom seemed equally troubled, the confused man said, "I'll take the boat." The sage kissed him on the forehead and said, "Go then. You are the boat. Life is the sea." As we have discovered so many times, we have everything we need within us. This ability to listen inside is our oldest oar. You are the boat. — Mark Nepo

And let Apollo drive Prince Hector back to battle,
breathe power back in his lungs, make him forget
the pain that racks his heart. Let him whip the Achaeans
in headlong panic rout and roll them back once more,
tumbling back on the oar-swept ships of Peleus' son Achilles.
And he, will launch his comrade Patroclus into action
and glorious Hector will cut him down with a spear
in front of Troy, once Patroclus has slaughtered
whole battalions of strong young fighting men
and among them all, my shining son Sarpedon.
But then - enraged for Patroclus -
brilliant Achilles will bring Prince Hector down.
And then, from that day on, I'll turn the tide of war:
back the fighting goes, no stopping it, ever. — Homer

Panurge stood beside the galley with an oar in his hand, not to help the herdsmen but to prevent from from somehow clambering aboard and thus escaping their death, and all the while preached to them eloquently . . . with rhetorical flourishes about the miseries of this world and the blessings of the next, affirming that those who had passed on to that place were happier than those who lived on in this vale of tears. — Francois Rabelais

I was alone and orphaned, in the middle of the Pacific, hanging on to an oar, an adult tiger in front of me, sharks beneath me, a storm raging about me. — Yann Martel

In any case, his religious teaching consisted mostly in more or less vague ethical remarks, an obscure mixture of ideals of English gentlemanliness and his favorite notions of personal hygiene. Everybody knew that his class was liable to degenerate into a demonstration of some practical points about rowing, with Buggy sitting on the table and showing us how to pull an oar. — Thomas Merton

Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore
Than labor in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;
O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more. — Alfred Tennyson

Perfect taste is the faculty of receiving the greatest possible pleasure from those material sources which are attractive to oar moral nature in its purity and perfection. — John Ruskin

The Greek in me wanted to know what it felt like to pull an oar. The intellectual wondered about how to get eight individuals to move to the same beat. The athlete wanted to check what has been described as the ultimate workout. The romantic craved seeing if the quirkiness of the sport - there is after all, little practical value to oarsmanship in the postindustrial age - stirred his blood. — Barry S. Strauss

When your life feels like you're on a sailboat, with no wind to fill your sails, there are still choices. You can drop anchor and enjoy your surroundings. Start your motor, if you have one. Grab an oar and start paddling, or wait for the wind to fill your sails once again. There are always other choices while crossing the ocean of life ... — James A. Murphy

And she swung the old oar at him with all her strength.
It hit with a great thwack, splintering in two, and he went over the side, into the dark, cold waters of the lake, sinking like a stone.
It took her two seconds. And then she let out a scream for help, tossing the broken oar away from her, and jumped into the water after him.
It was very cold, numbingly so, and as it closed over her head she grabbed for
him, wrapping her arms around his body, ready to sink to the bottom with him.
Instead he kicked, pushing them up so that they broke the surface, his arm
clamped around hers as she struggled. "Jesus, woman!" he snapped. "When did we have to become Romeo and Juliet? — Anne Stuart

Can you make it past me, thief-catcher?" Mat called, careful not to take his eyes off the man waiting for him with blade poised to strike. Sandar had insisted irritably on "thief-catcher," not "thief-taker," though Mat could not see any difference.
"I cannot," Sandar called from behind him. "If you move to let me by, you will lose room to swing that oar you call a staff, and he will spit you like a grunt."
Like a what? "Well, think of something, Tairen. This ragamuffin is grating my nerves."
The man in the gold-striped coat sneered. "You will be honored to die on the blade of the High Lord Darlin, peasant, if I allow it so." It was the first time he had deigned to speak. "Instead, I think I will have the pair of you hung by the heels, and watch while the skin is stripped from your bodies - "
"I do not think I'd like that," Mat said. — Robert Jordan

I always envisioned myself as traveling the ocean of life in a rowboat where my mother was one oar and my father, the other. Having two good, solid oars made rowing much easier. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Never rest on your oars as a boss. If you do, the whole company starts sinking. — Lee Iacocca

Among a thousand other things, she loved Alex for his easy use of we. His willing, unconscious way of taking an oar at the galley of your problem, even if it was just to listen. Even if both of you knew he couldn't do jack shit to help, he made it about us and made you feel less alone. "I — Suanne Laqueur

There are some people who leave impressions not so lasting as the imprint of an oar upon the water. — Kate Chopin

He knows enough, the mariner, who knows
Where lurk the shelves, and where the whirlpools boil,
What signs portend the storm: to subtler minds
He leaves to scan, from what mysterious cause
Charybdis rages in the Ionian wave;
Whence those impetuous currents in the main
Which neither oar nor sail can stem; and why
The roughening deep expects the storm, as sure
As red Orion mounts the shrouded heaven. — John Armstrong

When he came back, I hid my face within my hands. He said: "Fear nothing. Who has seen our kiss?
Who saw us? The night and the moon."
"And the stars and the first flush of dawn. The moon has seen its visage in the lake, and told it to the water 'neath the willows. The water told it to the rower's oar.
"And the oar has told it to the boat, and the boat has passed the secret to the fisher. Alas! alas! if that were only all! But the fisher told the secret to a woman.
"The fisher told the secret to a woman: my father and my mother and my sisters, and all of Hellas now shall know the tale. — Pierre Louis

If I were a wolf, I would howl. If I were a lion, I would oar. If we lived in the jungle, I would bring her a lion and a wolf to feast on. - Caleb — C.J. Roberts

When the boat had gone a few oar-strokes away from land they were still standing on the beach, gazing after the boy whom an unknown woman had left naked in their arms. They were holding hands, and other people gave way before them, and I could see no one except them. Or were they perhaps so extraordinary that other people melted away and vanished into thin air around them?
When I had clambered up with my bag onto the deck of the mail-boat North Star, I saw them walking back together on their way home: on the way to our turnstile-gate; home to Brekkukot, our house which was to be razed to the ground tomorrow. They were walking hand in hand, like children. — Halldor Laxness

Sunk in the mud, it took all my strength to flip it over. I lifted out the oar and inspected the bottom for holes and rotted wood. Seeing none, I gathered up my skirt, climbed in, and paddled to the middle of the pond, an untouchable place, far from everything. I tried to think what I would say to him, worried my voice would slink off again and leave me. I remained there a long while, lapping on the surface. Vapor curled on the water, dragonflies pricked the air, and I thought it all beautiful. — Sue Monk Kidd

This is what extremely grieves us, that a man who never fought Should contrive our fees to pilfer, on who for his native land Never to this day had oar, or lance, or blister in his hand. — Aristophanes

The cosmic conflict between good and evil is joined; chaotic sea and demonic sea monster verses the morally outraged man, Captain Ahab. In this boat, however, there is one man who does nothing. He doesn't hold an oar; he doesn't perspire; he doesn't shout. He is languid in the crash and the cursing. This man is the harpooner, quiet and poised, waiting. And then this sentence: 'To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooners of his world must start to their feet out of idleness, and not out of toil.' Was this the confirmation to cultivate what I had named an 'unbusy pastor'? — Eugene H. Peterson

Down Time's quaint stream
Without an oar
We are enforced to sail
Our Port a secret
Our Perchance a Gale
What Skipper would
Incur the Risk
What Buccaneer would ride
Without a surety from the Wind
Or schedule of the Tide — Emily Dickinson

My galley, charged with forgetfulness,
Thorough sharp seas in winter nights doth pass
'Tween rock and rock; and eke mine enemy, alas,
That is my lord, steereth with cruelness;
And every oar a thought in readiness,
As though that death were light in such a case.
An endless wind doth tear the sail apace
Of forced sighs and trusty fearfulness.
A rain of tears, a cloud of dark disdain,
Hath done the weared cords great hinderance;
Wreathed with error and eke with ignorance.
The stars be hid that led me to this pain.
Drowned is reason that should me consort,
And I remain despairing of the port. — Thomas Wyatt

He that floats lazily down the stream, in pursuit of something borne along by the same current, will find himself indeed moved forward; but unless he lays his hand to the oar, and increases his speed by his own labour, must be always at the same distance from that which he is following. — Samuel Johnson

What happens to you, Uhtred, is what you make happen. You will grow, you will learn the sword, you will learn the way of the shield wall, you will learn the oar, you will give honor to the gods, and then you will use what you have learned to make your life good or bad. — Bernard Cornwell

I must be able to say, 'Percival, a ridiculous name'. At the same time let me tell you, men and women, hurrying to the tube station, you would have had to respect him. You would have had to form up and follow behind him. How strange to oar one's way through crowds seeing life through hollow eyes, burning eyes. — Virginia Woolf

I dream of silent verses where the rhyme glides noiseless as an oar. — Richard Aldington

Consider their role models," Nick said. "You can't change the tide with an oar. — Gary Ponzo

A straight oar looks bent in the water. What matters is not merely that we see things but how we see them. — Michel De Montaigne

I can imagine nothing more wonderful than always wanting to keep a man ... It's this NOT wanting to keep them, and yet not quite being able to disentangle one's self, never quite having the ruthlessness to stike at the hands on the gunwale with an oar until they let go
that's the horrible thing. — Rose Wilder Lane

The water in music the oar forsakes. The air in music the wing forsakes. All things in move in music and write it. The mouse, lizard, and grasshopper sing together on the Turlock sands, sing with the morning stars. — John Muir

Statistically, I'd say comedy writers are perhaps the sanest category of show people. And why not? They make big money, and although it's not an easy trade - particularly when you're at your galley oar five days a week - it's easier on the nerves and the psyche than living with the brain-squeezing pressure and cares of being the Star. — Dick Cavett

They played, not beautifully but deep, ignoring their often discordant strings and striking right into the heart of the music they knew best, the true notes acting as their milestones. On the poop above their heads, where the weary helmsmen tended the new steering-oar and Babbington stood at the con, the men listened intently; it was the first sound of human life that they had heard, apart from the brief Christmas merriment, for a time they could scarcely measure. — Patrick O'Brian

The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

On the ear Drops the light drip of the suspended oar. — Lord Byron

With a smile, the man at the oar moved from side to side: It is beautiful, sir, it is as you say. But isn't every life, isn't every work beautiful? — Hermann Hesse

The expensive-looking thing in her hand resembled a cross between a miniature oar and an orthopedic brace. She was off for a fast game of something, but Case had no idea what. — William Gibson

Happy he whoe'er, content with the common lot, with safe breeze hugs the shore, and, fearing to trust his skiff to the wider sea, with unambitious oar keeps close to the land. — Seneca The Younger

You think I love flattery (says Dr. Johnson), and so I do; but a little too much always disgusts me: that fellow Richardson, on the contrary, could not be contented to sail quietly down the stream of reputation, without longing to taste the froth from every stroke of the oar. — Samuel Johnson

Shakespeare is forever coming into our affairs
putting in his oar, so to speak
with some pat word or sentence. — Thomas Bailey Aldrich

It is not good to have an oar in everyone's boat. — Charles Pratt, 1st Earl Camden

The Master Speed No speed of wind or water rushing by but you have speed far greater. You can climb back up a stream of radiance to the sky, and back through history up the stream of time. And you were given this swiftness, not for haste nor chiefly that you may go where you will, but in the rush of everything to waste, that you may have the power of standing still
off any still or moving thing you say. Two such as you with such a master speed From one another once you are agreed that life is only life forevermore together wing to wing and oar to oar. — Robert Frost