65+ Jacques Cousteau Quotes on Ocean Exploration and Conservation

Human blood is a testament to life’s origin in the ocean: its chemical composition is nearly identical to that of seawater.

For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it.

The Sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.

From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to earth. But man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.

The sea is the universal sewer.

Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.

The impossible missions are the only ones that succeed.

A lot of people attack the sea, I make love to it.

When one man, for whatever reason, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself.

We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.

The sea, the great unifier, is man’s only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: we are all in the same boat.

Overconsumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today.

Sometimes we are lucky enough to know that our lives have been changed, to discard the old, embrace the new, and run headlong down an immutable course.

People protect what they love.

We are living in an interminable succession of absurdities imposed by the myopic logic of short-term thinking.

Buoyed by water, he can fly in any direction—up, down, sideways—by merely flipping his hand. Underwater, man becomes an archangel.

All life is part of a complex relationship in which each is dependent upon the others, taking from, giving to, and living with all the rest.

In order to stabilize the world population, we must eliminate 350,000 per day.

We must plant the sea and herd its animals using the sea as farmers instead of hunters. That is what civilization is all about – farming replacing hunting.

The happiness of the bee and the dolphin is to exist. For man, it is to know that and to wonder at it.

The reason I love the sea I cannot explain – it’s physical. When you dive you begin to feel like an angel. It’s a liberation of your weight.

In the heat of the sun, the ocean is the boiler and condenser of a gigantic steam engine, a weather engine that governs crops, floods, droughts, frosts, hurricanes.

It takes generosity to discover the whole through others. If you realize you are only a violin, you can open yourself up to the world by playing your role in the concert.

Mankind has probably done more damage to the Earth in the 20th century than in all of previous human history.

Some of these islanders dutifully recited for us their ancient law: “Take no more from the sea in one day than there are people in your village. If you observe this rule, the bonito will run well again tomorrow.

Every explorer I have met has been driven—not coincidentally but quintessentially—by curiosity, by a single-minded, insatiable, and even jubilant need to know.

We only protect what we love, we only love what we understand, and we only understand what we are taught.

In the deep space of the sea, I have found my moon.

There’s about as much educational benefit to studying dolphins in captivity as there would be to studying mankind by only observing prisoners held in solitary.

It is certain that the study of human psychology if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.

Population growth is the primary source of environmental damage.

No aquarium, no tank in a marine land, however spacious it may be, can begin to duplicate the conditions of the sea. And no dolphin who inhabits one of those aquariums or one of those marine lands can be considered normal.

If we go on the way we have, the fault is our greed and if we are not willing to change, we will disappear from the face of the globe, to be replaced by the insect.

Pollution of the air or of the land ultimately ends up in the sea.

Some of these islanders dutifully recited for us their ancient law: “Take no more from the sea in one day than there are people in your village. If you observe this rule, the bonito will run well again tomorrow.

When we return wild animals to nature, we merely return them to what is already theirs. Man cannot give wild animals freedom, they can only take it away.

If we were logical, the future would be bleak, indeed. But we are more than logical. We are human beings, and we have faith, and we have hope, and we can work.

Farming as we do it is hunting, and in the sea, we act like barbarians.

But then we remembered. What did time matter when one was on an endless voyage?… And so we resigned ourselves and cultivated the virtue of patience. Only then did I notice that my back had begun hurting again?

The best way to observe a fish is to become a fish.

It is possible – indeed, it is likely – that, unless there is a great change in the near future, disaster will follow. And it will be a disaster in which man himself will be not only the perpetrator but also one of the victims.

The sea, the great unifier, is man’s only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: we are all in the same boat.

It has been calculated that when a factory saves some money by polluting the environment; it costs the citizens living in the vicinity ten times more than it saves the factory.

I wake up saying, I’m still alive; a miracle. And so I keep on pushing.

The real cure for our environmental problems is to understand that our job is to salvage Mother Nature. We are facing a formidable enemy in this field. It is the hunters… and convincing them to leave their guns on the wall is going to be very difficult.

I was playing when I invented the aqualung. I think the play is the most serious thing in the world.

Man, of all the animals, is probably the only one to regard himself as a great delicacy.

We must go and see for ourselves.

No sooner does man discover intelligence than he tries to involve it in his own stupidity.

People protect what they love.

What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what’s going on.

All life is part of a complex relationship in which each is dependent upon the others, taking from, giving to, and living with all the rest.

Mankind has probably done more damage to the Earth in the 20th century than in all of previous human history.

From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to earth. But man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.

There is about as much educational benefit to be gained in studying dolphins in captivity as there would be in studying mankind by only observing prisoners held in solitary confinement.

If we go on the way we have, the fault is our greed and if we are not willing to change, we will disappear from the face of the globe, to be replaced by the insect.

I said that the oceans were sick but they were not going to die. There is no death possible in the oceans – there will always be life – but they’re getting sicker every year.

We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.

Sometimes we are lucky enough to know that our lives have been changed, to discard the old, embrace the new, and run headlong down an immutable course.

I am not a scientist. I am, rather, an impresario of scientists.

I believe that national sovereignties will shrink in the face of universal interdependence.

We must plant the sea and herd its animals using the sea as farmers instead of hunters. That is what civilization is all about – farming replacing hunting.

We are human beings, and we have faith, and we have hope.

The biggest obstacle was mixing abortion with overpopulation. These are two things that have nothing to do with each other.

However fragmented the world, however intense the national rivalries, it is an inexorable fact that we become more interdependent every day.

Every explorer I have met has been driven—not coincidentally but quintessentially—by curiosity, by a single-minded, insatiable, and even jubilant need to know.

Without ethics, everything happens as if we were all five billion passengers on a big machinery and nobody is driving the machinery. And it’s going faster and faster, but we don’t know where.

If we consider our earth as a spaceship and the earthly astronauts as the crew of that spaceship, I would say wars can be analogous to mutinies aboard the ship.

The future of nutrition is found in the oceans.

The road to the future leads us smack into the wall. We simply ricochet off the alternatives that destiny offers. Our survival is no more than a question of 25, 50, or perhaps 100 years.

Under water, man becomes an archangel.