Peter Benchley Quotes

The first time I ever had the opportunity to dive on the Great Barrier Reef, it was while filming 'Oceans Deadliest' with Steve Irwin. I remember just how awestruck I was by its beauty.

My grandfather was Jacques Cousteau, a pioneer of ocean exploration and the co-inventor of scuba diving. Back in the 1940s when he tested out his invention which allowed humans to swim freely in the ocean with a portable air source for the first time in history, very little of the ocean had been explored let alone captured on film.

When I was a kid, Jacques Cousteau was my hero and the person who inspired me to become an underwater explorer. I have many other people who inspired me after him, but he is still my all-time hero.

I have been blessed to realize my dream of becoming an underwater photojournalist, but with that, I feel an obligation and sense of urgency to share what I have seen with others.

I want everybody to go jump in the ocean to see for themselves how beautiful it is, how important it is to get acquainted with fish swimming in the ocean, rather than just swimming with lemon slices and butter.

If you're going to make a lot of films about a particular group of animals, you might as well pick one that's fairly common. And octopus are: they live in all the oceans. They also live deep. And I can't say octopus are responsible for my really strong interest in getting in subs and going deep, but whatever the case, I like that.

Like my father and grandfather, Philippe and Jacques-Yves Cousteau, I've dedicated my life to exploring and protecting our seas, in large part through documentary film.

I have photographed sharks in waters around the globe, and I always want more and yearn to peer deeper into their world. To feed my passion and to raise awareness, I developed a story about sharks for 'National Geographic' magazine.

I'm a big diver. I like to dive when I travel, and my last dive was in the Galapagos. I used to live in San Francisco and I would dive all the time in Monterey.

I have been passionate about the oceans since I dipped my toes in the water at the first age of three.

I have made hundreds of dives in submersibles, with each dive holding the promise of seeing an organism or a behavior that no one has ever seen before. But I have always wondered about the animals and behaviors that we're not seeing because our bright lights and loud thrusters scare them away.

In the spring of 1996, I was working for Nickelodeon on a show called 'Rocko's Modern Life,' and I was interested at the time in doing a show about the ocean, an undersea show.

I want to be a scientist who studies the ocean when I grow up. I would go out to sea, and scuba dive, and find new things, and National Geographic will hire me.” Sure, Nudge. Probably around the time I become president.

There is an enormous amount to be learned about the sea; like most wildernesses, it has great potential.

I swam with my first shark in the 1980s. I was 20 miles off the coast of Rhode Island, working with a group of marine scientists. Late in the day, a 5-foot long blue shark swam into our chum slick. For the next hour, I marveled at the animal's stunning indigo color and the elegant way she moved effortlessly through the sea.

Being able to breathe underwater would be sweet. There is so much life underneath the water that we don't know about. I would love to check out the bottom of the ocean to see what's going on down there.

I've had the joy of spending thousands of hours under the sea. I wish I could take people along to see what I see, and to know what I know.

The ocean is 90% unexplored. It's a great canvas to paint Aquaman stories across, just like Green Lantern has space. It's more organic, which makes it different and interesting. It's alien, but it's terrestrial.

I like to dedicate myself wholeheartedly to a cause so that I have more impact. My goal is to shed light on the beauty of the ocean and how important it is for our planet.

Seventy percent of the planet is covered with water, and there's so much we can be doing with oceans, and it was one of the frontiers that people have more or less abandoned.

I love ocean life. I'm fascinated that so much of it remains unexplored by human beings. Diluted seawater consisted of nearly the same concentration of elements and minerals as blood plasma. They've got the same amount of sodium, too.

I'm friends with James Cameron. We've spent time together over the years because he is a diver and explorer and in his heart of hearts a biologist. We run into each other at scientific conferences.

The Deep Flight Challenger technology is a game-changer for ocean exploration.

People come to me and say, 'What'll I do if I go in the water and see a shark?' You don't have to do anything. The chances of that shark attacking you in any way is so remote. The sea should be enjoyed, the animals in it. When you see a shark underwater, you should say, 'How lucky I am to see this beautiful animal in his environment!'

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.