Quotes from Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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

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.

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

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.

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

I swam across the rocks and compared myself favorably with the sars. To swim fishlike, horizontally, was the logical method in a medium eight hundred times denser than air. To halt and hang attached to nothing, no lines or air pipe to the surface, was a dream. At night I had often had visions of flying by extending my arms as wings. Now I flew without wings. (Since that first aqualung flight, I have never had a dream of flying.)

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.

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

Human beings had polluted the seawater and mechanically destroyed the nearby coast; all life had paid this price. Often, in airports, on sidewalks, at restaurants, children and adults alike stop me to ask about barracuda and sharks; killer whales; the deadly sorcery of the Bermuda Triangle; the Loch Ness Monster. When I saw Le Veyron, I believed that the sea's most monstrous force doesn't live in Loch Ness. It lives in us.

On aime ce qui nous a émerveillé, et on protège ce que l'on aime.

no one can absolutely control the direction of his life; but each person can certainly influence it. The armchair explorers who complain that they never got their "one lucky shot" were never really infected by the incurable drive to explore. Those who have the bug—go.

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.

To enlarge the human perspective, to build on knowledge for future generations, to identify dangers, and to chart the course to a better world: If these are the goals of the explorer, then everyone—voyager, scientist and citizen, parent and child—is engaged in humanity's momentous expedition.

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

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.

Perché pensiamo all'oceano come a una semplice riserva di cibo, petrolio e minerali? Il mare non è un banco delle occasioni. Siamo accecati dalla cupidigia per le sue grandi ricchezze subacquee. La più grande risorsa dell'oceano non è materiale, ma è data dalla fonte illimitata d'ispirazione e di benessere che ne traiamo. Ma rischiamo di contaminarlo per sempre proprio quando stiamo imparando la sua scienza, la sua arte e la sua filosofia e come vivere nel suo grembo.

Silner's hut we called it. There he spent his free time, surrounded by boxes and cans (we use the spar deck to store everything that we have no other space for), doing those mysterious things that all photographers seem to do when left to themselves.

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 of which man himself will be not only the perpetrator, but also one of the victims. - p 46

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

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. It happened to me at Le Mourillon on that summer's day, when my eyes were opened to the sea.

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.

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

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

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