Your garden will reveal yourself.

A garden is not a picture, but a language.

Only destruction of the enemy can be called victory.

I loved anything to do with animals from a very early age.

If absolute power corrupts absolutely, where does that leave God??

All anybody needs to know about prizes is that Mozart never won one.

In the ocean, [bioluminescence] is the rule rather than the exception.

Wherever humans garden magnificently, there are magnificent heartbreaks.

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

Exploration is the engine that drives innovation. Innovation drives economic growth.

Nature does not hesitate to interfere with me. So I do not hesitate to tamper with it.

The giant squid has the biggest eyes of any animal on the planet. It's a visual predator.

Almost any garden, if you see it at just the right moment, can be confused with paradise.

During challenging times and when impassioned to act, human beings can be capable of miracles.

Gardening is full of mistakes, almost all of them pleasant and some of them actually instructive.

The mere fact that you get a lot of seeds in a packet doesn't mean you have to plant all of them.

I just was mesmerized by all of this life everywhere I looked. And so I wanted to be a marine biologist.

Exploration is the engine that drives innovation. Innovation drives economic growth. So let's all go exploring.

Compared to gardeners, I think it is generally agreed that others understand very little about anything of consequence.

That's a real problem when people bring exotics into their homes. Sometimes it's by accident, but sometimes it's on purpose.

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

The teeth on [the viperfish] are so long that if they closed inside the mouth of the fish, it would actually impale its own brain.

Without water, our planet would be one of the billions of lifeless rocks floating endlessly in the vastness of the inky-black void.

Mission 31 pays homage to my grandfather's work and all aquanauts who have since followed his lead in the name of ocean exploration.

There's a lionfish cookbook put out by the Reef Environmental Educational Foundation, and it tells you how to catch them, how to clean them.

My rule is: If you meet the weakest vessel, attack. If it is a vessel equal to yours, attack. And if it is stronger than yours, also attack.

The one thing I've learned exploring the deep is that you just can't even begin to imagine some of the bizarre creatures that are down there.

The difference between a fairy tale and a sea tale? A fairy tale starts with "Once upon a time". A sea tale starts with " This ain't no $hit"!

We need a NASA-like organization for ocean exploration, because we need to be exploring and protecting our life support systems here on Earth.

It is clear that if we are going to understand ocean ecosystems, we need to understand the part that bioluminescence plays in those ecosystems.

All who see it say, "Well, you have favorable conditions here. Everything grows for you." Everything grows for everybody. Everything dies for everybody, too.

There is nothing like the first hot days of spring when the gardener stops wondering if it's too soon to plant the dahlias and starts wondering if it's too late.

No matter how remote we feel we are from the oceans, every act each one of us takes in our everyday lives affects our planet's water cycle and in return affects us.

This is part of what's driving me, is this feeling like there's so much yet to be discovered in the oceans, and we're destroying it before we even know what's in it.

One of the things that's frustrated me as a deep-sea explorer is how many animals there probably are in the ocean that we know nothing about because of the way we explore the ocean.

Turn down the noise. Reduce the speed. Be like the somnolent bears, or those other animals that slow down and almost die in the cold season. Let it be the way it is. The magic is there in its power.

Giant squid aren't rare. Based on the number of beaks that have been found in the stomachs of sperm whales, it's thought that there are actually millions of them in the ocean, and yet, we haven't seen them.

Squid experts have been debating for some time about whether the giant squid is a passive predator that just floats around in the water and waits to bump into something. I was never one to imagine it to be passive.

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 never, ever would have imagined the kind of career I've had. It just wouldn't have occurred to me that anything like this could have been possible. I didn't have any such aspirations. And I still can't believe my good fortune.

I developed my camera system, called the Medusa, jointly with a colleague down in Australia as a method of exploring the ocean unobtrusively. The critical thing was that we didn't use white light, which I believe has been scaring the animals away.

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.

By the time one is eighty, it is said, there is no longer a tug of war in the garden with the May flowers hauling like mad against the claims of the other months. All is at last in balance and all is serene. The gardener is usually dead, of course.

If we are to be good stewards of the ocean, we need to understand what lives there and how the animals interact with each other and with their environment, which means we need to be constantly seeking new and improved methods for exploration and observation.

Now the gardener is the one who has seen everything ruined so many times that (even as his pain increases with each loss) he comprehends - truly knows - that where there was a garden once, it can be again, or where there never was, there yet can be a garden.

We've only explored about five percent 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 that we can't even yet imagine.

I developed an optical lure that imitates certain types of bioluminescent displays that I think might be attractive to large predators. The other way to do it is just use dead bait, but I think dead bait attracts scavengers, and we wanted to attract active predators.

In 2010, there was a TED event called Mission Blue held aboard the Lindblad Explorer in the Galapagos as part of the fulfillment of Sylvia Earle's TED wish. I spoke about a new way of exploring the ocean, one that focuses on attracting animals instead of scaring them away.

Our problems are solvable if they are clearly defined. To do so, we need to monitor our planetary life support systems the way doctors monitor a patient's vital signs and then use that information to protect ecosystem services as though our lives depend on it, because they do.

When caught in the clutches of a predator, the jelly produces a light display that is a pinwheel of light that is basically a call for help. It serves to attract the attention of a larger predator that may attack their attacker, thereby affording them an opportunity for escape.

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