Check out these inspiring surfing quotes from athletes and surfing enthusiasts.
Get inspired to ride the next big wave and embrace your surfing hobby.
This article contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase through a link on our site you are supporting our continued efforts to educate people like you in finding new and rewarding hobbies. Thank you!
You never really know what’s coming. A small wave, or maybe a big one. All you can really do is hope that when it comes, you can surf over it, instead of drown in its monstrosity.”
Alysha Speer
Surfing’s a more profound kind of sport than it looks. When you surf, you learn not to fight the power of nature, even if it gets violent.”
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
If you’re having a bad day, catch a wave.
Frosty Hesson
Wiping out is an under-appreciated skill.
Laird Hamilton
Waves are like friends. Some are big and bold, some not so much. Others come to greet you, while still there are those you have to chase. There are those which are deceiving, as they look good in the beginning, but will betray and crush you in the end. It’s truly hard to know the perfect wave. Only when you are within its folds do you realize it was either a good or bad decision on your part. By that point, it’s either too late or just right.
Andrew Pacholyk, Barefoot ~ A Surfer’s View of the Universe
For surfers, being tubed is like being reborn.
Robert Black
The best wave of your life is still out there.
Steve Hawk
Live life, one wave at a time.
Andrew Pacholyk, Barefoot ~ A Surfer’s View of the World
Waves are like women, you can never get enough of them, always want a better, more dangerous one, and occasionally you get dumped.
Robert Black
Surfing soothes me, it’s always been a kind of Zen experience for me. The ocean is so magnificent, peaceful, and awesome. The rest of the world disappears for me when I’m on a wave.
Paul Walker
The heart of a surfer’s life is the connection between the stillness of their board beneath them and the sea that moves about them. This is the one constant in a world that changes minute by minute.
Andrew Pacholyk, Barefoot ~ A Surfer’s View of the Universe
There’s an independence to surfing, it’s just you and the ocean. There aren’t a bunch of rules.
Lee Clow
The extremely good stuff – chocolate and great sex and weddings and hilarious jokes – fills a minute portion of an adult lifespan. The rest of life is the paddling: work, paying bills, flossing, getting sick, dying.”
Jaimal Yogis, Saltwater Buddha: A Surfer’s Quest to Find Zen on the Sea
Surfing to me is like playing music. You play different melodies with different boards.
Skip Frye
Surfing, alone among sports, generates laughter at its very suggestion, and this is because it turns not a skill into an art, but an inexplicable and useless urge into a vital way of life.
Matt Warshaw
Your surfing can get better on every turn, on every wave you catch. Learn to read the ocean better. A big part of my success has been wave knowledge.
Kelly Slater
Feelings are much like waves. We can’t stop them from coming but we can choose which one to surf.
Jonatan Martesson
There’s no secret to balance, you just have to feel the waves.
Frank Herbert
I think when a surfer becomes a surfer, it’s almost like an obligation to be an environmentalist at the same time.
Kelly Slater
One of the greatest things about the sport of surfing is that you need only three things: your body, a surf-board, and a wave.
Naima Green
Surfers have a perfection fetish. The perfect wave, etcetera. There is no such thing. Waves are not stationary objects in nature like roses or diamonds. They’re quick, violent events at the end of a long chain of storm action and ocean reaction. Even the most symmetrical breaks have quirks and a totally specific, local character, changing with every shift in tide and wind and swell.
William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
Life is a lot like surfing… When you get caught in the impact zone, you’ve got to just get back up. Because you never know what may be over the next wave.
Bethany Hamilton
If you don’t understand the wave, you can’t respect it. And if you don’t have respect, it’s only a matter of time before the ocean teaches you to get some.
Laird Hamilton
What I love the most about surfing is that it’s my first love. It’s the first thing I can remember being consumed by.
Stephanie Gilmore
Life is a lot like surfing… When you get caught in the impact zone, you’ve got to just get back up. Because you never know what may be over the next wave.
Bethany Hamilton, Soul Surfer: A True Story of Faith, Family, and Fighting to Get Back on the Board
Surfing is a way to be free.
Lisa Andersen
I did not consider, even passingly, that I had a choice when it came to surfing. My enchantment would take me where it would.
William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
“But surfing always had this horizon, this fear line, that made it different from other things, certainly from other sports I knew. You could do it with friends, but when the waves got big, or you got into trouble, there never seemed to be anyone around.”
William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
You can take a surfer out of the surf, but you can not take surf out of surfer.
Bob McTavish
The best surfer out there is the one having the most fun.
Phil Edwards
We’re all equal before a wave.
Laird Hamilton
