Quotes by Marine Biologists

It’s really kind of… well, beautiful, in a way. Even the monsters, once you get to know ‘em. We’re all beautiful.

It is often the case with finer natures that when the fire of the spirit dies out with increasing age the power of the intellect is unaltered or increased.

Margaret Gatty

If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchant-ments of later years the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial the alienation from the sources of our strength.

Rachel Carson

If a child is too keep alive his inborn sense of wonder ... he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it rediscovering with him the joy excitement and mystery of the world we live in.

Rachel Carson

We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road-the one less traveled by-offers our last our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.

Rachel Carson

A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.

Rachel Carson

For the sense of smell almost more than any other has the power to recall memories and it is a pity that we use it so little.

Rachel Carson

In every out-thrust headland in every curving beach in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.

Rachel Carson

I am always more interested in what I am about to do than in what I have already done.

Rachel Carson

Beginnings are apt to be shadowy.

Rachel Carson

The days are too short even for love how can there be enough time for quarreling?

Margaret Gatty

For the first time in the history of the world every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals from the moment of conception until death.

Rachel Carson

If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it rediscovering with him the joy excitement and mystery of the world we live in.

Rachel Carson

A whole planet of worlds, and not one of them—not one—has a soul. They wander through their lives separate and alone, unable even to communicate except through grunts and tokens: as if the essence of a sunset or a supernova could ever be contained in some string of phonemes, a few linear scratches of black on white. They've never known communion, can aspire to nothing but dissolution. The paradox of their biology is astonishing, yes; but the scale of their loneliness, the futility of these lives, overwhelms me.

Peter Watts

Everyone’s running from something.

Peter Watts

You should get more sleep," he remarked. "You won't need so many chemicals."She raised an eyebrow. "This from the man with half his bloodstream registered in the patent office." Jovellanos hadn't had her shots yet. She didn't need them in her current position, but she was too good at her job to stay where she was much longer. Desjardins looked forward to the day when her righteous stance on the Sanctity of Free Will went head-to-head against the legal prerequisites for promotion. She'd probably take one look at the list of perks and the new salary, and cave.He had, anyway.

Peter Watts

Word of advice,” the Colonel said from the other side. “Don’t tease the zombies.

Peter Watts

It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons

Rachel Carson

It was machines that scanned the heavens, machines that probed the space between atoms, machines that asked the questions and designed to experiments to answer them. All that was left for mere meat, apparently, was navel-gazing.

Peter Watts

Radar is too long in the tooth for fine detail.

Peter Watts

Everything’s an act. Everything’s strategy.

Peter Watts

The next time you stand on a beach at night, watching the moon’s bright path across the water, and the conscious of the moon-drawn tides, remember that the moon itself may have been born of a great tidal wave of earthly substance, torn off into space. And remember if the moon was formed in this fashion, the event may have had much to do with shaping the ocean basins and the continents as we know them.

Rachel Carson

Pack animals always tear apart the weaklings in their midst. Every child knows that much instinctively.

Peter Watts

People ask: Why should I care about the ocean? Because the ocean is the cornerstone of earth's life support system, it shapes climate and weather. It holds most of life on earth. 97% of earth's water is there. It's the blue heart of the planet — we should take care of our heart. It's what makes life possible for us. We still have a really good chance to make things better than they are. They won't get better unless we take the action and inspire others to do the same thing. No one is without power. Everybody has the capacity to do something.

Sylvia A. Earle

Eventually man, too, found his way back to the sea. Standing on its shores, he must have looked out upon it with wonder and curiosity, compounded with an unconscious recognition of his lineage. He could not physically re-enter the ocean as the seals and whales had done. But over the centuries, with all the skill and ingenuity and reasoning powers of his mind, he has sought to explore and investigate even its most remote parts, so that he might re-enter it mentally and imaginatively.

Rachel Carson

Preserving, protecting, and restoring our waters are tasks for many lifetimes, and sometimes the effort can seem overwhelming. But as long as we stay connected with all of the many, many blessings that water provides, and continue to keep that love in the forefront of our minds and hearts, as long as we remind ourselves to hope, then our stories will help connect others to water and encourage them to do what they can to help care for this beautiful Blue Marble world.

Wallace J. Nichols

I wondered whether water is a mirror for our darker emotions as much as it is an engine for our happiness. Water quiets all the noise, all the distractions, and connects you to your own thoughts.

Wallace J. Nichols

I wish you water.

Wallace J. Nichols

You can't hold back the water - but you can swim with the current.

Wallace J. Nichols

Extinction, the irrevocable loss of a species, causes pain that can never find relief. It is an ache that will pass from generation to generation for the rest of human history.

Callum Roberts

Only within the 20th Century has biological thought been focused on ecology, or the relation of the living creature to its environment. Awareness of ecological relationships is — or should be — the basis of modern conservation programs, for it is useless to attempt to preserve a living species unless the kind of land or water it requires is also preserved. So delicately interwoven are the relationships that when we disturb one thread of the community fabric we alter it all — perhaps almost imperceptibly, perhaps so drastically that destruction fol

Rachel Carson

The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe, the less taste we shall have for destruction.

Rachel Carson

We are accustomed to look for the gross and immediate effects and to ignore all else. Unless this appears promptly and in such obvious form that it cannot be ignored, we deny the existence of hazard. Even research men suffer from the handicap of inadequate methods of detecting the beginnings of injury. The lack of sufficiently delicate methods to detect injury before symptoms appear is one of the great unsolved problems in medicine.

Rachel Carson

Early accounts of the abundance of fish and wildlife offer us a window to the past that helps reveal the magnitude of subsequent declines. They provide us with benchmarks against which we can compare the condition of today's seas. Such benchmarks are valuable in countering the phenomenon of shifting environmental baselines, whereby each generation comes to view the environment into which it was born as natural, or normal. Shifting environmental baselines cause a collective societal amnesia in which gradual deterioration of the environment and depletion of wildlife populations pass almost unnoticed. Our expectations diminish with time, and with them goes our will to do something about the losses.

Callum Roberts

Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?

Rachel Carson

What’s the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you’re alive?

Peter Watts

But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best.

Peter Watts

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors.

Peter Watts

Transcendence is transformation.

Peter Watts

Dogs are always going to come up short if you insist on defining them as a weird kind of cat.

Peter Watts

The Zodiac had rearranged itself into a precise grid of bright points with luminous tails. It was as though the whole planet had been caught in some great closing net, the knots of its mesh aglow with St. Elmo's fire. It was beautiful. It was terrifying.

Peter Watts

Perfection’s unattainable but it isn’t unapproachable.

Peter Watts

Those who dwell , as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. Whatever the vexations and concerns of their personal lives, their thoughts can find paths that lead to inner contentment and to renewed excitement in living. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature--the reassurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.

Rachel Carson

Maybe your empathy's just a comforting lie, you ever think of that? Maybe you think you know how the other person feels but you're only feeling yourself, maybe you're even worst than me. Or maybe we're all just guessing.

Peter Watts

Property damage is so much easier to live with than murder.

Peter Watts

Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force to all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives.

Peter Watts

Perhaps they'd been conditioned by all the quarantines and blackouts, all the invisible boundaries CSIRA erected on a moment's notice. The rules changed from one second to the next, the rug could get pulled out just because the wind blew some exotic weed outside its acceptable home range. You couldn't fight something like that, you couldn't fight the wind. All you could do was adapt. People were evolving into herd animals.Or maybe just accepting that that's what they'd always been.

Peter Watts

Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good?

Rachel Carson

I don't understand how meat like you survived to adulthood.

Peter Watts

Like to hear a vampire folk tale?" Sarasti asked."Vampires have folk tales?"He took it for a yes. "A laser is assigned to find the darkness. Since it lives in a room without doors, or windows, or any other source of light, it thinks this will be easy. But everywhere it turns it sees brightness. Every wall, every piece of furniture it points at is brightly lit. Eventually it concludes there is no darkness, that light is everywhere.

Peter Watts

Technology implies belligerence.

Peter Watts

Here and there awareness is growing that man, far from being the overlord of all creation, is himself part of nature, subject to the same cosmic forces that control all other life. Man's future welfare and probably even his survival depend upon his learning to live in harmony, rather than in combat, with these fo

Rachel Carson

Stars, everywhere. So many stars that I could not for the life meunderstand how the sky could contain them all yet be so black.

Peter Watts

You said it was colorful. What changed?""I don't know. Maybe nothing. I just— I don't actually remember the dreams when I wake up any more.""So how do you know you still have them?" Pag asked.Fuck it I thought, and tipped back the last of my pint in a single gulp. "I know.""How?"I frowned, taken aback. I had to think for a few moments before I remembered."I wake up smiling," I said.

Peter Watts

The vampires win every time.

Peter Watts

Nine days after Perreault first saw the woman in black, an Indonesian mother of four came out of her tent long enough to claim that the mermaid had risen, fully-formed, from the very center of the quake.One of her boys, hearing this, said that he'd heard it was the other way around.

Peter Watts

It’s kind of like a Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven.

Peter Watts

There's no such things as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternative.

Peter Watts

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