Top 60 Jacques-Yves Cousteau Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

Featured in: Environment Quotes, Nature Quotes

2. “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.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Featured in: Quotes About Ocean

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

8. “Population growth is the primary source of environmental damage.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

9. “People protect what they love.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

10. “In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 per day.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

13. “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.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

14. “The best way to observe a fish is to become a fish.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

15. “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

16. “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

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

18. “We must go and see for ourselves.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

19. “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

20. “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

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

23. “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

24. “I am absolutely enraptured by the atmosphere of a wreck. A dead ship is the house of a tremendous amount of life-fish and plants. The mixture of life and death is mysterious, even religious. There is the same sense of peace and mood that you feel on entering a cathedral.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

25. “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

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

27. “The future of nutrition is found in the oceans.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

28. “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.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

30. “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.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “Under water, man becomes an archangel.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

35. “We are human beings, and we have faith, and we have hope.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

36. “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

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

38. “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.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

39. “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

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

41. “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

42. “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

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

45. “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

46. “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.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

47. “The sea is the universal sewer.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

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

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau

49. “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

50. “Buoyed by water, he can fly in any direction-up, down, sideways-by merely flipping his hand. Under water, man becomes an archangel.”

— Jacques-Yves Cousteau