Jacques-Yves Cousteau Quotes
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Mankind has probably done more damage to the Earth in the 20th century than in all of previous human history.
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.
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.
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 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.
However fragmented the world, however intense the national rivalries, it is an inexorable fact that we become more interdependent every day.
Man, of all the animals, is probably the only one to regard himself as a great delicacy.
We know how to organize warfare, but do we know how to act when confronted with peace?
I said that the oceans were sick but they're not going to die. There is no death possible in the oceans - there will always be life - but they're getting sicker every year.
With earth's burgeoning human population to feed we must turn to the sea with understanding and new technology. We need to farm it as we farm the land.
And let us remember too that life, in its exuberance, always succeeds in overflowing the narrow limits within which man thinks he can confine it.
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.
No sooner does man discover intelligence than he tries to involve it in his own stupidity.
In order to save the planet it would be necessary to kill 350,000 people per day.
May this continent, the last explored by humankind, be the first one to be spared by humankind.
The biggest obstacle was mixing abortion with overpopulation. These are two things that have nothing to do with each other.
