Last Updated: July 18, 2023
For scuba diving enthusiasts, explaining why you love exploring the ocean’s depths can be a tall order. There’s nothing quite like immersing yourself in the blue murky depths. And what better way to communicate how it makes you feel than with the perfect quote?
Using quotes is a great way to express how scuba diving makes you feel. If you’re just a beginner, or thinking of taking up scuba diving, they are also a great source of inspiration.
There are many scuba diving quotes. You can find those that will inspire you, that are short and pithy, some will tickle your funny bone and are great for ocean lovers everywhere.
In this article, you’ll see the world’s best scuba diving quotes, separated into eight easy-to-find sections. If you’re looking for a quote about scuba diving, you’re sure to find it here.
Inspirational Scuba Diving Quotes
Diving is an investment of time and money but the rewards can be life-changing, literally.
– Andy Cummings
75% of the Earth is water. Divers live on a much bigger planet.
– Unknown
On the surface of the ocean, men wage war and destroy each other; but down here, just a few feet beneath the surface, there is a calm and peace, unmolested by man.
– Jules Verne
We dive not to escape life, but for life not to escape us.
– Unknown
Diving, while it is an “adventure sport,” takes people into a calm and quiet environment – there are no phones, no emails, no way for the terrestrial world to contact you. A diver can drift through the water, undisturbed, and enjoy a period of quiet. The only noises are the hiss of exhalations and the munching of parrotfish. Yes, diving is generally a buddy sport, but your buddy has a regulator in his mouth and can’t talk.
– Anonymous
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.
– James Cameron, director of some great diving films
Why is it that scuba divers and surfers are some of the strongest advocates of ocean conservation? Because they’ve spent time in and around the ocean, and they’ve personally seen the beauty, the fragility, and even the degradation of our planet’s blue heart.
– Sylvia Earle
Nine metres … 15 metres … 18 metres … Scuba diving is a strange, reverential experience: breathing through an oxygen tank, a meditative series of inhales and exhales, in an otherwise inhospitable environment. Total submersion dulls your sense of touch and deprives you of sound and smell, focusing perception through your mask – a window into the unfathomable. The sensation is wonderful and exhilarating, but tempered by a heightened awareness of your fragile, alien body.
– Jill Tomac
Well … I love moving in extra dimensions. Not just backwards and forwards, but up and down and around. And fins. I love swimming with fins – human feet are practically useless underwater. I love all the unique things you see on each dive. Millions of little aquatic soap operas playing out between all the creatures. And the silence. Well, it’s not really silent down there, but the roar of bubbles blocks any other sound …
– Kirsten Hubbard
First Time Scuba Diving Quotes
Taking your first breath underwater is an incredible experience. You’ve been breathing your whole life, it’s the definition of second nature, but all of a sudden the whole game has changed. It’s something that you’ve never focused on but now it won’t escape your mind.
– Natalie Lavery
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.
– Sir David Attenborough
Something, most certainly, happens to a diver’s emotions underwater. It is not merely a side effect of the pleasing, vaguely erotic sensation of water pressure on the body. Nor is it alone the peculiar sense of weightlessness, which permits a diver to hang motionless in open water, observing sea life large as whales around him; not the ability of a diver, descending in that condition, to slowly tumble and rotate in all three spatial planes. It is some complicated mix of these emotions, together with the constant proximity of real terror.
– Barry Lopez
What all divers should remember is that scuba diving is a fun exploration of life. When you dive, don’t take yourself so seriously. Loosen up and relax. The point of scuba diving is not to focus on yourself; it’s to focus on the beauty of the underwater world. There’s nothing to accomplish on dives.
– Vanessa Vitri
Scuba diving does not require superhuman swimming powers. The goal of scuba diving is to spend as little energy as possible while diving. The more relaxed you are the longer your air will last.
– Gerrard Dennis
Short (But Sweet) Scuba Diving Quotes
The cure for anything is saltwater: sweat, tears, or the sea.
– Isak Dinesen
For most people, this is as close to being an astronaut as you’ll ever get. It’s leaving planet Earth behind and entering an alien world.
– Mary Frances Emmons
Scuba diving is fairly easy to figure out … strap a tank on your back and breathe.
– Thomas Gronfeldt Senger
I actually love diving at night; you see a lot of fish then that you don’t see in the daytime.
– Sylvia Earle
I do an awful lot of scuba diving. I love to be on the ocean, under the ocean. I live next to the ocean.
– James Cameron
My favorite thing to do on this planet is to scuba dive.
– Buzz Aldrin
For the rich, there is therapy. For the rest of us, there is SCUBA DIVING!
– Anon
We need to respect the oceans and take care of them as if our lives depended on it. Because they do.
– Sylvia Earle
Diving is a leap of faith plus gravity.
– Gabrielle Zevin
He who would search for pearls must dive below.
– John Dryden
It isn’t always the treasure that drives men down deep into the sea; it’s something else, something unexplainable, even to them.
– Jennifer Arnett
Underwater I hear the water coming to my body, I hear the sunlight penetrating the water.
– James Nestor
Funny Dive Quotes
Be nice to divers. We know places where nobody will find you.
– Unknown
Diving is like sex. – The first time you try you are nervous but it’s still the best thing you’ve ever tried. The more you do it, the better it gets. As you do it with more people, you learn new techniques. With experience, you can do it longer and deeper … If you enjoy sex, you’ll love diving.
– Unknown
Wake up, eat breakfast, dive, morning tea, dive, lunch, sleep, dive, afternoon tea, enjoy a beer with another beautiful sunset, dinner, some small talk about the days diving, and sleep again … very stressful.
– Shannon Brian Screaigh
Scuba diving is itself a hazardous sport. To do it without any training is tantamount to playing Russian roulette with a loaded revolver.
– Robert F. Burgess
Shouldn’t dive this morning, too much blood in the alcohol system …
– Unknown
Feel free to pee in your rental wetsuit … everyone else has …
– Anon
If anything goes wrong underwater, relax, take a deep breath, and think it through. You have the rest of your life to solve the problem.
– Unknown
Friends don’t let friends buy jacket style BCDs
– Unknown
Nitrogen Narcosis is for Christmas, Oxygen Toxicity is for Life
– Unknown
Friends don’t let friends buy split fins.
– Unknown
Remember when sex was safe and diving was dangerous?
– Anon
If you close your eyes the sharks will disappear.
– Unknown
You don’t have to outswim the shark, you just have to outswim your buddy.
– Unknown
To scuba dive or not to scuba dive. What a stupid question!
– Unknown
You should always dive with a buddy … if you have an equipment problem buddy can help … if you run out of air buddy can help … if there is a shark attack your odds are now 50-50 instead of 100%.
– Unknown
I dress in black rubber, hang metal clips all over my body, and pee on myself. I’m a commercial diver.
– Unknown commercial diver
The dive went great, then they entered the water.
– Unknown
The visibility is great if you get right up close to what you want to see.
– Unknown
Divers are some of the most calm, composed and stress-free people I know. I’m just not sure whether it’s calming effect of the sea or brain damage from lack of oxygen …
– Unknown divemaster
Hooking on scuba gear and blindly diving into zombie-infested water is a wonderful way to mix the two childhood terrors of being eaten and drowning.
– Max Brooks
The instructor carries the responsibility, the students the tanks.
– Julius Launhardt
Life stages: Crawl, walk, dive.
– Unknown
There are two types of divers: Those who pee in their wetsuit, and those who lie about it.
– Unknown
The hardest part about diving in a dry suit is remembering not to pee.
– Unknown instructor
I hate diving in the rain … you get wet!
– Unknown
Why do scuba divers fall backward off a boat? Because if they fell forwards they’d still be in the boat.
– Mark Hoppus
Recommended Read: Best Scuba Diving Jokes and Puns
What happens in your wetsuit, stays in your wetsuit.
– Unknown
Quotes About Diving Into the Unknown
The world’s finest wilderness lies beneath the waves.
– Robert Wyland
Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
– Andre Gide
Either you decide to stay in the shallow end of the pool or you go out in the ocean.
– Christopher Reeve
There’s nothing wrong with enjoying looking at the surface of the ocean itself, except that when you finally see what goes on underwater, you realize that you’ve been missing the whole point of the ocean.
– Dave Barry
The thing about the ocean is that the surface won’t always tell you what is going on underneath.
– Jennifer Arnett
Your worst day stuck on the surface wishing you could get underwater is better than your best day stuck underwater wishing you could get on the surface.
– Anon
Freediving Quotes
Freediving is not only a sport, it’s a way to understand who we are.
– Natalia Molchanova, world record holder
The scuba diver dives to look around. The freediver dives to look inside.
– Umberto Pelizzari
Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.
– Unknown
I am surrounded by blue split by rays of sunlight dappling between plankton particles … I become weightless, suspended as if I were floating in space. Tension leaves my muscles. After this, my body becomes negatively buoyant and freefalls towards the ocean floor. It feels like I’m flying.
– Chantae Reden
When nothing goes right, go down.
– Unknown
There is no place for fear, panic, or mistakes.
– Johanna Norblad
Under the surface, everything stops.
– Unknown
Freediving is about silence…the silence that comes from within.
– Jacques Mayol
I must be a mermaid. I have no fear of depth yet a great fear of shallow living.
– Anais Nin
Jacques Yves Cousteau Quotes
A lot of people attack the sea. I make love to it.
Diving for me is like a loving kiss.
The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.
Mankind has probably done more damage to the Earth in the 20th century than in all of previous human history.
When one man, for whatever reason, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself.
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.
Also Read: Top Scuba Diving Myths
The best way to observe a fish is to become a fish.
People protect what they love.
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.
We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.
From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to the earth. But man only has to sink beneath the surface and he is free.
Quotes For Ocean Lovers
Every time I slip into the ocean, it’s like going home.
– Sylvia Earle
The ocean stirs the heart, inspires the imagination and brings eternal joy to the soul.
– Robert Wyland
Don’t wait any longer. Dive in the ocean, leave and let the sea be you.
– Rumi
The sea is the only embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence.
– Jules Verne
One time on a dive, I wound up drifting up in darkness surrounded by billions of photoluminescent creatures. It was a religious experience, one only a poet could do justice to.
– Graham Hawkes
And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it, we are going back from whence we came.
– John F. Kennedy
It’s another world, what the sea gives us. It’s a paradise.
– Roberto Alejandro “Tito” Ramirez Rivas
Being underwater reminds me of the beauty in life’s simplicity. The sea pulses with life. It exudes it, breathes it; a constant reminder that everything is liquid.
– Timi Waters
It’s out there at sea that you are really yourself.
– Vito Dumas
You’re 30 feet underwater, the ocean is brisk, the slight current is stirring the sand, the colorful fish are swarming, the bright red lobsters are playfully harassing the neon eels – everything seems surreal, especially the fact that you’re breathing underwater.
– Natalie Lavery
I’ve had the joy of spending thousands of hours under the sea. I wish I could take people along to see what I see and to know what I know.
– Sylvia Earle
Final Thoughts
This post demonstrates that there are many great quotes about scuba diving. While there are more, these felt like the best ones to me.
Which one is your favorite? If you know any cool dive quotes I’ve missed let me know.
I hope this collection inspires and motivates you to get into the water and to take care of the oceans.
My unbounded love for the oceans and everything it has to offer motivated me to pursue my passion and become a professional scuba diving instructor.
I keep reading, exploring, and learning more about scuba diving and the underwater world all the time, so I’m excited to share my knowledge with fellow scuba enthusiasts and hopefully contribute a little to your development as a diver. I want people to fall in love with the oceans with as much passion as I have. Read more about me here.