Karl Pilkington Quotes

How much deeper would the ocean be if sponges didn’t live there?

The box jellyfish takes you into an area of what I'd call science fiction. You feel like you've been dipped in hot burning oil. You burst into flames.

I do an awful lot of scuba diving. I love to be on the ocean, under the ocean. I live next to the ocean.

I was bitten by an octopus.

Finding animals that make light in the ocean is easy. Just drag a net through the water anywhere in the upper 3000 feet, and as many as 80-90% of the animals you catch can make light. The biomimetic lure that I developed imitates one of these - a common deep sea jellyfish called Atolla.

I'm a mermaid now, half my body.

Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species—including man—crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.

The oceans are a way of life. We fish; we sail; we have a robust marine economy.

Great attention gets paid to rainforests because of the diversity of life there. Diversity in the oceans is even greater.

What better way to learn about life in the ocean--and how we are changing it--than through stories of blind zombie worms, immortal jellyfish, and unicorns of the sea? The Extreme Life of the Sea is an insightful book that inspires awe and wonder about our ocean, and brilliantly shows us the immense possibilities of life on Earth.

It was a real whale, a photograph of a real whale. I looked into its tiny wise eye and wondered where that eye was now. Was it alive and swimming, or had it died long ago, or was it dying now, right this second? When a whale dies, it falls down through the ocean slowly, over the course of a day. All the other fish see it fall, like a giant statue, like a building, but slowly, slowly.

It's a little-appreciated fact that most of the animals in our ocean make light.

There's really not a difference between an octopus and, like, a giant pile of snot.

I don't like grouper fish. Well, they're okay. They hang around star fish. Because they're grouper fish.

Minimize your therbligs until it becomes automatic; this doubles your effective lifetime - and thereby gives time to enjoy butterflies and kittens and rainbows.

The naturalists of yore esteemed the ocean to be a treasury of wonders, and sought therein for monstrosities and organisms contrary to the law of nature, such as they interpreted it.

People who see life as anything more than pure entertainment are missing the point.

You take a book, and what can you do with a book? Can you cook an egg on a book? No. Can you dig a hole? No. Is it a good weapon? No. The fact that it's good for nothing kind of makes it almost all-important.

You cannot give me an instance of any man who is permitted to lay out his own time contriving not to have tedious hours.

There was a magic about the sea. People were drawn to it. People wanted to love by it, swim in it, play in it, look at it. It was a living thing that was as unpredictable as a great stage actor: it could be calm and welcoming, opening its arms to embrace it's audience one moment, but then could explode with its stormy tempers, flinging people around, wanting them out, attacking coastlines, breaking down islands.

The Hawaiian Islands were discovered by hardy Polynesian sailors, who crossed thousands of miles of open ocean in primitive canoes, braving violent storm-tossed seas for months at a time. My family and I arrived by modern commercial aviation, which was infinitely worse.

It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility.

It is as useless to fight against the interpretations of ignorance as to whip the fog.

Since I began exploring the ocean in the 1950s, 90 percent of the big fish have been stripped away. Tuna, sharks, swordfish, cod, halibut, you name it, the numbers have just collapsed. Also, about half of the coral reefs are gone, globally, from where they were just a few decades ago.