Coral Reefs Quotes

• Coral reefs represent some of the worlds most spectacular beauty spots, but they are also the foundation of marine life: without them many of the seas most exquisite species will not survive.

  Sheherazade Goldsmith

  Marine, Sea, Foundation

  30 Copy quote

• Think about this: If water is the blood of our planet flowing through veinous rivers, streams, and into our oceans, what does that make coral? Our heart. We simply cannot survive without our heart; therefore, it's mandatory we heal and protect our coral reefs now.

  Ian Somerhalder

  Ocean, Heart, Thinking

  23 Copy quote

• Ice ages have come and gone. Coral reefs have persisted.

  Sylvia Earle

  Ice, Age, Gone

  25 Copy quote

• Ten percent of the big fish still remain. There are still some blue whales. There are still some krill in Antarctica. There are a few oysters in Chesapeake Bay. Half the coral reefs are still in pretty good shape, a jeweled belt around the middle of the planet. There's still time, but not a lot, to turn things around.

  Sylvia Earle

  Lakes, Blue, Oysters

  75 Copy quote

• There are ecosystems like coral reefs [at risk] through ocean acidification. Those are valuable things that we should protect.

  Bill Gates

  Ocean, Ecosystems, Risk

  "THE BILL GATES INTERVIEW: An energy miracle is coming, and it's going to change the world". Interview with Drake Baer, www.businessinsider.com. February 22, 2016.

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• We still have 10 percent of the sharks. We still have half of the coral reefs. However, if we wait another 50 years, opportunities might well be gone.

  Sylvia Earle

  Opportunity, Sharks, Years

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• I can mention many moments that were unforgettable and revelatory. But the most single revelatory three minutes was the first time I put on scuba gear and dived on a coral reef. It's just the unbelievable fact that you can move in three dimensions.

  David Attenborough

  Moving, Firsts, Facts

  22 Copy quote

• Coral reefs are under assault. They are rapidly being degraded by human activities. They are over-fished, bombed and poisoned. They are smothered by sediment, and choked by algae growing on nutrient-rich sewage and fertilizer run-off. They are damaged by irresponsible tourism and are being severely stressed by the warming of the world's oceans. Each of these pressures is bad enough in itself, but together, the cocktail is proving lethal.

  Klaus Topfer

  Running, Ocean, Animal

  18 Copy quote

• I watched the coral reefs that I studied as a student vanish in the blink of an eye, and for decades I wrote and spoke of ocean obituaries. But big scary problems without solutions lead to apathy, not action.

  Nancy Knowlton

  Ocean, Eye, Scary

  11 Copy quote

• That includes not cutting down the rain forest, and stop polluting the ocean because once we kill the coral reefs and the rain forest, this earth is toast.

  Michael Berryman

  Rain, Ocean, Cutting

  Interview with Vyeto Malesh, marsdust.net. January 22, 2017.

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• Coral reefs, the rain forest of the ocean, are home for one-third of the species of the sea. Coral reefs are under stress for several reasons, including warming of the ocean, but especially because of ocean acidification, a direct effect of added carbon dioxide. Ocean life dependent on carbonate shells and skeletons is threatened by dissolution as the ocean becomes more acid.

  James Hansen

  Stress, Rain, Ocean

  12 Copy quote

• Oman overall has great animal and plant biodiversity because it has mountains, desert, coastal areas and rich coral reefs.

  Saadi

  Animal, Mountain, Desert

  25 Copy quote

• The creatures of the sea hold special mystery, and they are among the most exciting, graceful, and beautiful on Earth. Just consider the living riot of a coral reef, the beauty of an albatross, the awesome power of a giant turtle, the grace of a dolphin. Now multiply that by the millions of creatures in the sea. Wow!

  Carl Safina

  Beautiful, Turtles, Sea

  23 Copy quote

• I'm haunted by the thought of what Ray Anderson calls 'tomorrow's child,' asking why we didn't do something on our watch to save sharks and bluefin tuna and squids and coral reefs and the living ocean while there still was time. Well, now is that time.

  Sylvia Earle

  Children, Ocean, Sharks

  18 Copy quote

• The Pacific coral reef, as a kind of oasis in a desert, can stand as an object lesson for man who must now learn that mutualism between autotrophic and heterotrophic components, and between producers and consumers in the societal realm, coupled with efficient recycling of materials and use of energy, are the keys to maintaining prosperity in a world of limited resources.

  Eugene Odum

  Men, Keys, Oasis

  19 Copy quote

• Water can be a blessing or a curse. Too often we make conservation about saving a whale, a coral reef or a marsh. But we don't make it about saving life. The one thing that every single human being has in common is our need for water.

  Alexandra Cousteau

  Blessing, Whales, Water

  Source: www.glamour.com

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• And so the Word had breath, and wrought With human hands the creed of creeds In loveliness of perfect deeds, More strong than all poetic thoughts; Which he may read that binds the sheaf, Or builds the house, or digs the grave, And those wild eyes that watch the waves In roarings round the coral reef.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Strong, Eye, Hands

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson (2014). “Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Selected Poetry: A Broadview Anthology of British Literature Edition”, p.122, Broadview Press

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• A billion homo sapiens are added every 11 years to the planet. The hypertrophy of a single species pushes other life-forms out of bed and into extinction. The decline of biological diversity is real and severe. The alarming loss of soil fertility, forest cover, and coral reef viability and the release of fossilized CO2 that nature put away 300 million years ago in its march toward greater diversity - all these "losses" and many others are the result of one life-form annihilating other life-forms in its immoral confusion of "dominion" with "domination."

  Leonard Sweet

  Real, Loss, Years

  14 Copy quote

• 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.

  Sylvia Earle

  Ocean, Sharks, Names

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• I build a book the way coral reefs are built: millions of little calcareous skeletons piling up one atop another, though in my case the skeletons are drafts.

  Dean Koontz

  Book, Skeletons, Littles

  "Interview with the Master of Suspense, Dean Koontz (part 1)". Interview with Trisha Sugarek, www.writeratplay.com. June 28, 2014.

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• Language is a city, to the building of which every human being brought a stone; yet he is no more to be credited with the grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to the coral reef which is the basis of the continent.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Cells, Cities, Add

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1875). “Letters and Social Aims”, p.160

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• We have changed. We are no longer, as I said, bipedal monkeys. We are instead a kind of cybernetic coral reef of organic components and inorganic technological components.

  Terence McKenna

  Monkeys, Kind, Said

  24 Copy quote

• In the course of time I have learned to tramp about coral reefs, twenty to thirty feet under water, so unconcernedly that I can pay attention to particular definite things. But after all my silly fears have been allayed, even now, with eyes overflowing with surfeit of color, I am still almost inarticulate. We need a whole new vocabulary, new adjectives, adequately to describe the designs and colors of under sea.

  William Beebe

  Ocean, Silly, Eye

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• Not infrequently, when a man asks a woman to marry him, he means that he wants her to help him love himself, and if, blinded by her own feeling, she takes him for her captain, her pleasure craft becomes a pirate ship, the colours change to a black flag with a sinister sign, and her inevitable destiny is the coral reef.

  Myrtle Reed

  Mean, Destiny, Men

  Myrtle Reed, Mary Badollet Powell (1911). “The Myrtle Reed Year Book: Epigrams and Opinions from the Writings and Sayings of Myrtle Reed”

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• In the year 2007, seals, otters, lions, turtles, frogs, apes, snakes, butterflies, polar bears, cheetahs, whales are disappearing along with their variously furnished homes: cloud forests, rain forests, ice pack, boreal forests, coral reefs, forests of deciduous trees, conifer and palm.

  Eban Goodstein

  Rain, Home, Butterfly

  55 Copy quote