The Human, the Orchid and the Octopus Quotes

“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, The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus: Exploring and Conserving Our Natural World

“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.”
― Jacques-Yves Cousteau, The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus: Exploring and Conserving Our Natural World

“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.”
― Jacques-Yves Cousteau, The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus: Exploring and Conserving Our Natural World

“On aime ce qui nous a émerveillé, et on protège ce que l'on aime.”
― Jacques-Yves Cousteau, The Human, the Orchid and the Octopus: Exploring and Conserving Our Natural World

“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.”
― Jacques-Yves Cousteau, The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus: Exploring and Conserving Our Natural World

“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.”
― Jacques-Yves Cousteau, The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus: Exploring and Conserving Our Natural World

“what motivated explorers? What inspired Magellan, battered by South America’s strange williwaw winds, to hold to his course through an unknown strait with no guarantee that it would lead to an untraversed sea? What makes adult and child alike feel so desperate at the prospect of abandoning their advance along shining rails, across shining seas, that lead beyond the boundaries of their familiar world? What inspires an explorer to undertake a voyage with no destination, to search with no objective, to travel with no itinerary other than the uncharted, the unfathomed, the unexpected?”
― Jacques-Yves Cousteau, The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus: Exploring and Conserving Our Natural World

“How many of these people rise to their feet or fall to their knees in cathedrals, temples, synagogues, mosques, reciting the word of their God by rote, all the while ignoring the living word of God just outside the window? How many read scriptures that praise their God’s creation but acquiesce when damage is done to it? Daily newspapers report on politicians, presidents, ayatollahs who righteously and regularly proclaim that they lead their nations in accordance with the word of their God; we hear of martyrs who have died because they have refused to repudiate their beliefs, of revolutions, civil wars, holy wars—all waged by people who are willing to fight for the right to believe what they choose. They choose to believe in a God who has issued divine commands; how many honor His divine commands to safeguard the environment? How many instead behave as latter-day Peters, vociferously attesting to their belief in God but denying Him when the opportunity arises to protect the environment as holy writings mandate?”
― Jacques-Yves Cousteau, The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus: Exploring and Conserving Our Natural World