The best way to observe a fish is to become a fish.
Interpretation
To truly understand something, you must immerse yourself in it.
This quote by Jacques Yves Cousteau emphasizes the importance of experiential learning and deep observation. By becoming fully engaged in an environment or situation, one can gain unique insights and a better understanding that mere observation cannot provide.
In practice
A teacher might use this quote to encourage students to engage more deeply with their subjects.
We must alert and organise the world's people to pressure world leaders to take specific steps to solve the two root causes of our environmental crises - exploding population growth and wasteful consumption of irreplaceable resources. Overconsumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today.
No aquarium, no tank in a marine land, however spacious it may be, can begin to duplicate the conditions of the sea. And no dolphin who inhabits one of those aquariums or one of those marine lands can be considered normal.
It's terrible to have to say this. World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn't even say it. But the general situation in which we are involved is lamentable.
The impossible missions are the only ones which succeed.
The sea, the great unifier, is man's only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: we are all in the same boat.
The sea is not a bargain basement.
Advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill.
Gratitude develops faith. The surest path out of a slump is marked by the road sign "thank you, God."
To invent out of knowledge means to produce inventions that are true. Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him. It also should have a manual drill and a crank handle in case the machine breaks down. If you're going to write, you have to find out what's bad for you. Part of that you learn fast, and then you learn what's good for you.
A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man's brow.
Every director bites the hand that lays the golden egg.
When it comes down to it, I don't have much in the way of advice to offer you, but here it is: Read to children. Vote. And never buy anything from a man who's selling fear.
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