Enric Sala Quotes

Jacques Cousteau was my hero.

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.

As a young boy, I was very interested - as I still am - in all sorts of adventure and exploration. I thought about being an astronaut, a dinosaur scientist, or marine biologist, but I clearly was drawn to the ocean and to the water.

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.

Right up until the late 18th century, when the first weighted lines were used to probe the ocean depths, many people believed the seas were bottomless - the watery equivalent of infinite outer space.

I think I have the best job in the world. Seventy-one percent of the planet is covered by water, we've explored less than five percent of the ocean, and there are so many fabulous discoveries that have yet to be made.

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.

See, I've always seen Jacques Cousteau as a hero, mate. He's a legend - like my dad, just a legend. And so what he did for conservation in the '60s through the '70s was just phenomenal.

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

When I was a child, I saw my father diving to the deepest point in the ocean with the U.S. Navy.

I am an underwater explorer, not a treasure hunter.

The Jacques Cousteau shows actually got me very excited about the fact that there's an alien world here on Earth.

I love storytelling, I love being a visual person, and it just made perfect sense to be an underwater photographer and explore the ocean and work with scientists.

I think Captain Cousteau might be the father of the environmental movement.

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

Every time you dive, you hope you'll see something new - some new species. Sometimes the ocean gives you a gift, sometimes it doesn't.

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 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.

Now we have new tools for exploring the deep and have to pull together a deep exploration program that takes advantage of them.

When I was a little kid, I always wanted to be an oceanographer.

When I was six, all I dreamt about was becoming a diver on Jacques Cousteau's boat, the famous Calypso.

I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.

I suppose the marine biology was a post-teen thing. I was kind of on my way but I was one of those teenage boys who got to 13, 14 and had no idea what I was going to do. I liked natural history. I liked the outdoors. And I found the sea quite interesting.

One day, one of my dreams is to someday get to do Nemo in '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.'

If you compare NASA's annual budget to explore the heavens, that one year budget would fund NOAA's budget to explore the oceans for 1,600 years.