A life on the ocean wave,
A home on the rolling deep,
For the spark that nature gave
I have the right to keep.

An underwater-listening device, the “hydrophone,” has, in recent years, shown that sea creatures click, grunt, snap, moan, and, in general, make the ocean depths as maddeningly noisy as ever the land is.

Ask a follower of Bacon what [science] the new philosophy, as it was called in the time of Charles the Second, has effected for mankind, and his answer is ready; “It has lengthened life; it has mitigated pain; it has extinguished diseases; it has increased the fertility of the soil; it has given new securities to the mariner; it has furnished new arms to the warrior; it has spanned great rivers and estuaries with bridges of form unknown to our fathers; it has guided the thunderbolt innocuously from heaven to earth; it has lighted up the night with the splendour of the day; it has extended the range of the human vision; it has multiplied the power of the human muscles; it has accelerated motion; it has annihilated distance; it has facilitated intercourse, correspondence, all friendly offices, all dispatch of business; it has enabled man to descend to the depths of the sea, to soar into the air, to penetrate securely into the noxious recesses of the earth, to traverse the land in cars which whirl along without horses, to cross the ocean in ships which run ten knots an hour against the wind. These are but a part of its fruits, and of its first-fruits; for it is a philosophy which never rests, which has never attained, which is never perfect. Its law is progress. A point which yesterday was invisible is its goal to-day, and will be its starting-point to-morrow.”

It always seems to be easier to obtain financial support for science when there is some connection with defence. Oceanography is no exception to this.

It is a sign of our power, and our criminal folly, that we can pollute the vast ocean and are doing so.

It is fashionable nowadays to talk about the endless riches of the sea. The ocean is regarded as a sort of bargain basement, but I don’t agree with that estimate. People don’t realize that water in the liquid state is very rare in the universe. Away from earth it is usually a gas. This moisture is a blessed treasure, and it is our basic duty, if we don’t want to commit suicide, to preserve it.

Multitudinous laughter of the waves of ocean.

Nature’s great and wonderful power is more demonstrated in the sea than on the land.

Sir Edward Bullard maintains that the recent upsurge of keenness in oceanography is correlated with the development of modern sea-sick remedies.

The big blue area that dominates the view of earth from space was once our home and today represents 97 percent of the biosphere where life exists, providing the water we drink and the air we breathe. And we are destroying it.

The ocean's bottom is at least as important to us as the moon's behind.

The study of fish in the sea may be the most necessary of all our oceanographic researches because we shall increasingly be made to turn to the sea as a vast food producer by the increase in the population of the world.

There is a river in the ocean. In the severest droughts it never fails, and in the mightiest floods it never overflows. Its banks and its bottom are of cold water, while its current is of warm. The Gulf of Mexico is its fountain, and its mouth is in the Arctic Seas. It is the Gulf Stream. There is in the world no other such majestic flow of waters. Its current is more rapid than the Mississippi or the Amazon.

There were tides in the new earth, long before there was an ocean.

They had neither compass, nor astronomical instruments, nor any of the appliances of our time for finding their position at sea; they could only sail by the sun, moon, and stars, and it seems incomprehensible how for days and weeks, when these were invisible, they were able to find their course through fog and bad weather; but they found it, and in the open craft of the Norwegian Vikings, with their square sails, fared north and west over the whole ocean, from Novaya Zemlya and Spitsbergen to Greenland, Baffin Bay, Newfoundland, and North America.

This sceptred isle,…
This fortress built by Nature for herself…
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

When I think of the floor of the deep sea, the single, overwhelming fact that possesses my imagination is the accumulation of sediments.