Sea and Sky's Sea Quotes Title
Oceans | Seashore | Marine Life | Ocean Exploration
Ocean Conservation | Ships and Sailing

 

Ocean Exploration Quotes

"There are more active volcanoes beneath the sea than on land by two orders of magnitude."

- Robert Ballard, Ocean Researcher

"There's probably more history now preserved underwater than in all the museums of the world combined. And there's no law governing that history. It's finders keepers."

- Robert Ballard, Ocean Researcher

"It is a quiet and peaceful place - and a fitting place for the remains of this greatest of sea tragedies to rest."

- Robert Ballard, Discoverer of the Titanic Wreck

Diver Exploring a Shipwreck

"Forever may it remain that way. And may God bless these now-found souls."

- Robert Ballard, Referring to the wreck of the Titanic

"The Titanic will protect itself."

- Robert Ballard, Ocean Researcher

"Most of the southern hemisphere is unexplored. We had more exploration ships down there during Captain Cook's time than now. It's amazing."

- Robert Ballard, Ocean Researcher

"If you compare NASA's annual budget to explore the heavens, that one year budget would fund NOAA's budget to explore the oceans for 1,600 years."

- Robert Ballard, Ocean Researcher

SCUBA Diver in the Ocean

"Almost a quarter of our planet is a single mountain range and we didn't enter it until after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went to the moon. So we went to the moon, played golf up there, before we went to the largest feature on our own planet."

- Robert Ballard, Ocean Researcher

"I am really dedicated to understanding the planet/creature on which we live and know that means I must go beneath the sea to see 72 percent of what is going on."

- Robert Ballard, Ocean Researcher

"Well, when I was a kid, I grew up in San Diego next to the ocean. The ocean was my friend - my best friend."

- Robert Ballard, Ocean Researcher

"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, Oceanographer

School of Fish in the Ocean

"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, Oceanographer

"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, Oceanographer

"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, Oceanographer

"We know more about the surface of the Moon and about Mars than we do about [the deep sea floor], despite the fact that we have yet to extract a gram of food, a breath of oxygen or a drop of water from those bodies."

- Paul Snelgrove, Oceanographer

SCUBA Diver on a Coral Reef

"Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life."

- Rachel Carson, Marine Biologist

"There is a river in the ocean. In the severest droughts it never fails, and in the mightiest floods it never overflows. Its banks and its bottom are of cold water, while its current is of warm. The Gulf of Mexico is its fountain, and its mouth is in the Arctic Sea. It is the Gulf Stream."

- Matthew Fontaine Maury, Oceanographer

"The ocean's bottom is at least as important to us as the moon's behind."

- Gordon G. Lill, Oceanographer

"The great obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge."

- Daniel J. Boorstin, Writer