Jacques Yves Cousteau Quotes

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

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

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.

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 future is in the hands of those who explore... and from all the beauty they discover while crossing perpetually receding frontiers, they develop for nature and for humankind an infinite love.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

People protect what they love.

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

There are no boundaries in the real Planet Earth. No United States, no Soviet Union, no China, no Taiwan...Rivers flow unimpeded across the swaths of continents. The persistent tides - the pulse of the sea - do not discriminate; they push against all the varied shores on Earth.

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

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.

Overconsumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today

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.

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

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

It is fashionable nowadays to talk about the endless riches of the sea. The ocean is regarded as a sort of bargain basement, but I don't agree with that estimate. People don't realize that water in the liquid state is very rare in the universe. Away from earth it is usually a gas. This moisture is a blessed treasure, and it is our basic duty, if we don't want to commit suicide, to preserve it.

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.

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

We must alert and organise the world's people to pressure world leaders to take specific steps to solve the two root causes of our environmental crises - exploding population growth and wasteful consumption of irreplaceable resources. Overconsumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today.

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

Population growth is the primary source of environmental damage.

Man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.

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

The little bee returns with evening's gloom, To join her comrades in the braided hive, Where, housed beside their might honey-comb, They dream their polity shall long survive. Charles Tennyson Turner - A Summer Night in the Bee Hive The happiness of the bee & the dolphin is to exist. For man it is to know that & to wonder at it.

I experimented with all possible maneuvers-loops, somersaults and barrel rolls. I stood upside down on one finger and burst out laughing, a shrill, distorted laugh. Nothing I did altered the automatic rhythm of the air. Delivered from gravity and buoyancy, I flew around in space.

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

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

There was wildlife, untouched, a jungle at the border of the sea, never seen by those who floated on the opaque roof. Describing his early experience, in 1936, when a fellow naval officer, Philippe Tailliez, gave him goggles to see below the Mediterranean Sea surface.

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

If human civilization is going to invade the waters of the earth, then let it be first of all to carry a message of respect.

Perhaps the time has come to formulate a moral code which would govern our relations with the great creatures of the sea as well as with those on dry land. That this will come to pass is my dear wish.

It's terrible to have to say this. World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn't even say it. But the general situation in which we are involved is lamentable.

The United Nation's goal is to reduce population selectively by encouraging abortion, forced sterilization, and control of human reproduction, and regards two-thirds of the human population as excess baggage, with 350,000 people to be eliminated per day.

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.

The impossible missions are the only ones which succeed.

We must go and see for ourselves.

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

The sea is not a bargain basement.

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

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.

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.

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.

The idea of a group of elders is that, in past civilizations, they have linked worlds; the other world was also present in this one. There is also the argument that elders have "experience." The problem is that experience teaches fear of change. Experience kills imagination. Experience makes people conservative. What we are facing tomorrow requires the force of imagination, not wisdom from yesterday.

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

The sea is the universal sewer.

The future of nutrition is found in the oceans