Paul Walker Quotes

Most people are surprised when they hear my somber figures: we know of 2 million species of plants, animals and microorganisms, and we can give them each a scientific name and a diagnostic description. We know, perhaps generously, more than just a little bit of the anatomy in no more than 10 percent. We have done thorough studies in fewer than one-tenth of 1 percent. And the total number of species on Earth is unknown to the nearest order of magnitude.

I believe that natural history has lost much by the vague general treatment that is so common.

Species can be recognized by their morphological characteristics and songs.

We've only explored about 5% of our ocean. There are great discoveries yet to be made down there - fantastic creatures representing millions of years of evolution and possibly bioactive compounds that could benefit us in ways we can't even imagine.

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.

As a surfer, I am interested in the ocean. And I am concerned and interested in all of these natural and cultural rumblings underfoot as well.

I would love to go help baby sea turtles back into the ocean after hatching in Mexico.

I don't know where to put whales. I'm sticking them here, but I don't have any reason for it.

On a sea floor that looks like a sandy mud bottom, that at first glance might appear to be sand and mud, when you look closely and sit there as I do for a while and just wait, all sorts of creatures show themselves, with little heads popping out of the sand. It is a metropolis.

The naturalists of our own time hold equal faith in the wonders of the sea, but seek therein rather for the links of nature's chain than for apparent exceptions.

If you want to study one of these strange organisms, you had better have a good justification. It's not good to study gene organisation in some obscure insect that no one's ever heard about.

There is so much life underneath the water that we don't know about.

Every fish fertilizes the water in a way that generates the plankton that ultimately leads back into the food chain, but also yields oxygen, grabs carbon - it's a part of what makes the ocean function and what makes the planet function.

Like a shipwreck or a jetty, almost anything that forms a structure in the ocean, whether it is natural or artificial over time, collects life.

For decades I have tried to peel back the layers of mystery surrounding many marine creatures, though most have held tightly to their secrets. One animal that keeps me pondering is the shark. Spellbound by these enigmatic animals since I first encountered them in New England, I never tire of watching their special blend of power and grace.

It was always understood that plants and animals, though completely contrasted in their higher representatives, approached each other very closely in their lower and simpler forms. But they were believed not to blend.

One day I caught four Dolphins, how much I have gazed at these beautiful creatures... as they changed their hue in twenty varieties of richest arrangement of tints.

The thing I'm particularly interested in is natural history. In its heyday, the mid- and late-nineteenth century, when people were going out and gathering the first huge caches of data and trying to understand what was living and growing everywhere, there was such a sense of freshness to that pursuit. It's very exciting.

I love nature - it's probably my most favorite thing. I don't watch much telly, the telly hardly goes on, but the things I do watch are sort of nature programs, and something about the oceans and the amount of weird fish that's in there.

The oceans have been a part of my life for as long as I remember. As a child, I spent hours playing in the surf off Cape Cod. In college, I fished along the rocky coast of Nova Scotia with my school's fishing team.

The former conviction that these two kingdoms were wholly different in structure, in function, and in kind of life, was not seriously disturbed by the difficulties which the naturalist encountered when he undertook to define them.

Discovering new species is a passion. A day without collecting plants is painful for me.

I grew up with the biologists. I know how they think.

What we need is an electronic encyclopedia of life, with one page for each species. On each page is given everything known about that species.

It is, I find, in zoology as it is in botany: all nature is so full, that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined.