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Ships are a strange kind of commodity because they're very lumpy, very big individual units, but they're commodities.

I don't know where to put whales. I'm sticking them here, but I don't have any reason for it.

My experience of ships is that on them one makes an interesting discovery about the world. One finds one can do without it completely.

I understand a ship to be made for the carrying and preservation of the cargo, and so long as the ship can be saved, with the cargo, it should never be abandoned. This Union likewise should never be abandoned unless it fails and the possibility of its preservation shall cease to exist, without throwing passengers and cargo overboard.

You can never tell what ships are worth.

It is not the ship so much as the skillful sailing that assures the prosperous voyage.

Seafarers are used to being exploited. At sea, the captain moans at chandlers who supply ships with green bananas that will never ripen; at fruit that goes moldy obscenely fast; at sub-standard meat.

A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for.

There are more than one hundred thousand ships at sea carrying all the solids, liquids and gases that we need to live.