Check out our collection of 30+ Swimming Quotes for motivation in the pool.
Get fired up for your next race, or find the perfect quote for your social media posts.
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“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”
William Faulkner
“Be not the slave of your own past – plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The water is your friend…you don’t have to fight with water, just share the same spirit as the water, and it will help you move.”
Alexandr Popov
“To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.”
Alan Wilson Watts
“Once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.”
Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
“Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Swimming is a confusing sport, because sometimes you do it for fun, and other times you do it to not die. And when I’m swimming, sometimes I’m not sure which one it is.”
Demetri Martin
“Feel your way through the water. Don’t fight it.”
Mark Young
“She kept swimming out into life because she hadn’t yet found a rock to stand on.”
Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
“Swimming is normal for me. I’m relaxed. I’m comfortable, and I know my surroundings. It’s my home.”
Michael Phelps
“I drank to drown my sorrows, but the damned things learned how to swim.”
Frida Kahlo
“On matters of style, swim with the current, on matters of principle, stand like a rock.”
Thomas Jefferson
“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
“He talked about the ocean between people. And how the whole point of everything is to find a shore worth swimming to.”
Becky Albertalli, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda
“I just love swimming. I find myself so addicted to it. I often feel that I’m forever on the brink of discovering something new.”
Ian Thorpe
“Promise me you will not spend so much time treading water and trying to keep your head above the waves that you forget, truly forget, how much you have always loved to swim.”
Tyler Knott Gregson
“I let it go. It’s like swimming against the current. It exhausts you. After a while, whoever you are, you just have to let go, and the river brings you home.”
Joanne Harris, Five Quarters of the Orange
“Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.”
Frank Herbert, Dune
“The water doesn’t know your age.”
Dara Torres
“To be the very best, you have to train like you’re the second best.”
Ian Thorpe
“She had a strange feeling in the pit of her stomach, like when you’re swimming and you want to put your feet down on something solid, but the water’s deeper than you think and there’s nothing there”
Julia Gregson, East of the Sun
“Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.”
Malcolm Muggeridge
“I concentrate on preparing to swim my race and let the other swimmers think about me, not me about them.”
Amanda Beard
“Swimming might be the closest to flying a human being can get.”
Elizabeth Acevedo
“I wouldn’t say anything is impossible. I think that everything is possible as long as you put your mind to it and put the work and time into it.”
Michael Phelps
“Swimming isn’t everything, winning is.”
Mark Spitz
“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.”
Warren Buffett
“Swimming was the opposite of panic attack. Fluid and calm and quiet.”
John Corey Whaley
“Swimming is simply moving meditation.”
Cesar Nikko Caharian
“The water is your friend…..you don’t have to fight with water, just share the same spirit as the water, and it will help you move.”
Alexandr Popov
“We shall not be happy unless we live like good animals, unless we enjoy the exercise of the ordinary functions of life: eating, sleeping, loving, walking, running, swimming, riding, sailing.”
William Morris
“Enjoy swimming for swimming’s sake. We have to spend far too much time in the water to not enjoy the process of challenging yourself of moving through the water.”
Jeff Rouse
