Titanic Quotes

“There is nothing that man can build that nature cannot destroy,”
― Filson Young, Titanic

“pigmy men”
― Filson Young, Titanic

“meaningless networks of trunks and branches and sticks and twigs of iron. But as you glide nearer still you see that the forest is not lifeless, nor its branches deserted. From the bottom to the topmost boughs it is crowded with a life that at first seems like that of mites in the interstices of some rotting fabric, and then like birds crowding the branches of the leafless forest, and finally appears as a multitude of pigmy men swarming and toiling amid the skeleton iron structures that are as vast as cathedrals and seem as frail as gossamer. It is from them that the clamour arises, the clamour that seemed so gentle and musical a mile away, and that now, as you come closer, grows strident and deafening. Of all the sounds produced by man’s labour in the world this sound of a great shipbuilding yard is the most painful. Only the harshest materials and the harshest actions are engaged in producing it: iron struck upon iron, or steel smitten upon steel, or steel upon iron,”
― Filson Young, Titanic

“aft”
― Filson Young, Titanic

“green triangle of the shore. Behind you the Copeland”
― Filson Young, Titanic

“The Titanic was in more senses than one a fool’s paradise. There is nothing that man can build that nature cannot destroy, and far as he may advance in might and knowledge and cunning, her blind strength will always be more than his match.”
― Filson Young, Titanic

“other activities on which we have been looking. For even here, as elsewhere, half of the world does not know and does not care how the other half lives.”
― Filson Young, Titanic

“In such moments all artificial bonds are useless. It is what men are in themselves that determines their conduct; and discipline and conduct like this are proofs, not of the superiority of one race over another, but that in the core of human nature itself there is an abiding sweetness and soundness that fear cannot embitter nor death corrupt.”
― Filson Young, Titanic

“for there were people on the Titanic who had so entrenched themselves behind ramparts of wealth and influence as to have wellnigh forgotten that, equally with the waif and the pauper, they were exposed to the caprice of destiny;”
― Filson Young, Titanic

“To say that all the men who died on the Titanic were heroes would be as absurd as to say that all who were saved were cowards. There were heroes among both groups and cowards among both groups, as there must be among any large number of men.”
― Filson Young, Titanic

“There is nothing that man can build that nature cannot destroy, and far as he may advance in might and knowledge and cunning, her blind strength will always be more than his match.”
― Filson Young, Titanic

“Time is no more for the fifteen hundred souls who perished with them; but Honour and Glory, by strange ways and unlooked-for events, have come into their own. It was not Time, nor the creatures and things of Time, that received their final crown there; but things that have nothing to do with Time, qualities that, in their power of rising beyond all human limitations, we must needs call divine.”
― Filson Young, Titanic

“The fields of foam-flecked blue, sunlit or cloud-shadowed by day; the starlight on the waters; the slow and scarcely perceptible swinging of the ship’s rail against the violet and spangled sky; the low murmur of voices, the liquid notes of violins, the trampling tune of the engines—to how many others have not these been the properties of a magic world; for how many others, as long as men continue to go in ships upon the sea, will they not be the symbols of a joy that is as old as time, and that is found to be new by every generation!”
― Filson Young, Titanic

“Phillips taps out his “O.K., O.M.,” which is a kind of cockney Marconi for “All right, old man.”
― Filson Young, Titanic

“for it is not always the loudest whisper that is the most important.”
― Filson Young, Titanic

“But the heart lives its own life, spinning gossamer threads that float away astern across time and space, joining us invisibly to that which made and fashioned us, and to which we hope to return.”
― Filson Young, Titanic

“For there is one thing that the designers of this sea-palace seem to have forgotten and seem to be a little ashamed of—and that is the sea itself. There it lies, an eternal prospect beyond these curtained windows, by far the most lovely and wonderful thing visible; but it seems to be forgotten there.”
― Filson Young, Titanic