Jacques-Yves Cousteau Quotes

“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.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Sometime 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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

“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.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

“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.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

“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.)”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

“People protect what they love.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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.

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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.

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

“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.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

“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.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

“The sea is the universal sewer.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

“The awareness of our environment came progressively in all countries with different outlets.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

“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.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

“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.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

“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.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

“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.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

We must go and see for ourselves.

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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.

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

May this continent, the last explored by humankind, be the first one to be spared by humankind.

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

“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.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

“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.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

“Overconsumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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.

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

We know how to organize warfare, but do we know how to act when confronted with peace?

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

“The impossible missions are the only ones which succeed.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

“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.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

In order to save the planet it would be necessary to kill 350,000 people per day.

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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.

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

“We have to prepare for what life could become in 40 years. We need to outline what is possible and what is impossible with the non-renewable resources of the Earth. What role will technological improvement play? Taking all this into account, what kind of life can we produce in the best way for 10 billion people? That's a problem that needs to be solved.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

“Under water, man becomes an archangel.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

“The future of nutrition is found in the oceans”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

“A common denominator in every single nuclear accident - a nuclear plant or on a nuclear submarine - is that before the specialists even know what has happened, they rush to the media saying, 'There's no danger to the public.' They do this before they themselves know what has happened because they are terrified that the public might react violently, either by panic or by revolt.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Through the window of my mask I see a wall of coral, its surface a living kaleidoscope of lilac flecks, splashes of gold, reddish streaks and yellows, all tinged by the familiar transparent blue of the sea.

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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.

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

“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.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

The sea is not a bargain basement.

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Population growth is the primary source of environmental damage.

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

“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.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau