It is a curious fact, but nobody ever is sea-sick - on land. At sea, you come across plenty of people very bad indeed, whole boat-loads of them; but I never met a man yet, on land, who had ever known at all what it was to be sea-sick. Where the thousands upon thousands of bad sailors that swarm in every ship hide themselves when they are on land is a mystery.
Interpretation
The quote humorously points out that people only experience seasickness when at sea, not on land.
Jerome K. Jerome humorously observes the peculiar phenomenon of seasickness, highlighting that while many suffer from it on boats, no one admits to ever experiencing it on land. This suggests a comedic irony in the way experiences can differ in context, and it evokes a light-hearted curiosity about human nature and its tendencies to exaggerate or hide discomfort.
In practice
Use this quote in a light-hearted speech about travel mishaps.
Some people are under the impression that all that is required to make a good fisherman is the ability to tell lies easily and without blushing; but this is a mistake. Mere bald fabrication is useless; the veriest tyro can manage that. It is in the circumstantial detail, the embellishing touches of probability, the general air of scrupulous - almost of pedantic - veracity, that the experienced angler is seen.
It is in our faults and failings, not in our virtues, that we touch each other, and find sympathy. It is in our follies that we are one.
Life is a thing to be lived, not spent; to be faced, not ordered. Life is not a game of chess, the victory to the most knowing; it is a game of cards, one's hand by skill to be made the best of.
There may be a better land where bicycle saddles are made of rainbow, stuffed with cloud; in this world the simplest thing is to get used to something hard.
The world must be rather a rough place for clever people. Ordinary folk dislike them, and as for themselves, they hate each other most cordially.
A cat's got her own opinion of human beings. She don't say much, but you can tell enough to make you anxious not to hear the whole of it.
I got a fan letter on the back of a prison menu. And I remember thinking, 'Well, they get pie. It's not so bad. They get pie on the weekends.' I want to say blueberry and also a Boston cream pie. Not so bad.
Sometimes if something is entertaining and amusing, people tend to think that it doesn't have the depth of something that's dramatic. I don't think that's true.
In my youth there were words you couldn't say in front of a girl; now you can't say 'girl.'
A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
A satirist is a man whose flesh creeps so at the ugly and the savage and the incongruous aspects of society that he has to express them as brutally and nakedly as possible in order to get relief.
That is a society editor, sitting there elegantly dressed, with his legs crossed in that indolent way, observing the clothes the ladies wear, so that he can describe them for his paper and make them out finer than they are and get bribes for it and become wealthy.
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