Top 66 Whale Quotes

No highbrow literary type would ever say ‘Moby Dick’ is good but it’s just about a whale, or a Jane Austen would be important if she wasn’t just writing about romantic relationships.

‘The Whale’ was in the category of so-called serious music, and yet it brings together a wide series of musical styles. It was influenced by people such as The Beatles, the spirit of the times, and I think ‘The Whale’ certainly had a pop element to it.

A dark room with some low-level whale music and a flat bed and a woman pulling your shoulder back and forth is a happy place.

To have a huge, friendly whale willingly approach your boat and look you straight in the eye is without doubt one of the most extraordinary experiences on the planet.

Most whale photos you see show whales in this beautiful blue water – it’s almost like space.

People think it’s very strange because I love whale watching – you don’t see whales a lot where I’m from.

The whale is endangered, while the ant continues to do just fine.

A film like ‘Whale Rider’ is equally truthful, perhaps more so, to the Maori experience; Maori people respond to ‘Whale Rider’ because it’s a world that they understand.

‘Whale Talk’ is a tough book, but it is also a compassionate book about telling the truth and about redemption. I didn’t draw the tough parts out of thin air; they are stories handed to me by people in pain.

Whales are killed today to supply the limited demand for whale meat or to be used in pet foods or as fodder for fur-bearing animals used in the fur trade.

With every film I’ve made, ‘Whale Rider’ included, I’ve had a vision that was far bigger than the budget allowed.

We have sat on the river bank and caught catfish with pin hooks. The time has come to harpoon a whale.

The fin whale is the second largest whale species on Earth, weighing up to 80 tons.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, Biarritz was a community of whalers. During the Middle Ages, it had grown from a small fishing village into a profitable whaling industry. Whale oil was liquid gold to these sea-faring folk.

By 1760, the Nantucketers had virtually exterminated the local whale population.

Right whales – so named because they were ‘the right whale to kill’ – grazed the waters off Nantucket as if they were seagoing cattle, straining the nutrient-rich surface of the ocean through the bushy plates of baleen in their perpetually grinning mouths.

In ‘Finding Dory,’ I play a whale shark named Destiny who can’t swim very well. We’re both extremely clumsy!

If the Bible had said that Jonah swallowed the whale, I would believe it.

Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.

Light doesn’t penetrate beneath the surface of the water, so ocean creatures like whales and dolphins and even 800 species of fish communicate by sound. And a North Atlantic right whale can transmit across hundreds of miles.

In ‘Deadliest Catch,’ we have men in ships in rough seas catching crabs. With ‘Whale Wars,’ we have men and women from a dozen different nations going out to sea in rough weather to help save the whales. We also have icebergs, whales, penguins, and dramatic ship-to-ship confrontations.

I love ‘Sky Whale!’ I play it in bed, I play it in church, I even play it on the toilet!

‘Whale Rider’ was quite an extraordinary shoot. We were in that community on the east coast and so much of what you see in that film was very present.

Sea World’s killer whale collection needs constant replenishing. The average life span of the animals in captivity is less than half the average for killer whales in the ocean.

The killer whale Tilikum has helped SeaWorld sell millions of dollars worth of tickets.

My commitment is to my kids and my mum and I’m having a whale of a time.

Filmmaking has been my love since my mother brought me to see James Whale’s ‘Frankenstein’ at the local library at the age of six.

Does Greenpeace think it can stop whaling in Antarctica by publicly eating whale meat and declaring it delicious? What are these people thinking?

It used to be that the highest ambition of American novelists was to write ‘the Great American Novel,’ that great white whale of American fiction that would encompass all the American experience in one great book.

Shamu the killer whale is Sea World’s Mickey Mouse; whales named Shamu are the star attractions of three parks and the focus of their marketing efforts.

People get very passionate about saving the whale, but when something like a Florida indigo snake is endangered there are not a lot of people out there holding up placards.

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

Thanks to a lot of people, not just myself, ‘Whale Rider’ had an amazing impact emotionally, and people remember it. I count myself very lucky that all those doors were unlocked, I just had to open them.

God gave me some weird, beautiful scent that makes men and women go crazy. People compare it to Carvel. It is a whale of a smell.

Being lampooned on ‘South Park’ is hardly something to complain about. They brought the issue of the dolphin and whale slaughter by the Japanese to a very large audience. I could not really care less how I was portrayed.

I will not watch a whale die. I’ve not seen a whale die since I left Greenpeace in 1977.

I had whale tartare when I was in Japan, but I probably wouldn’t have it again.

In 1939, Orwell wrote a long essay titled ‘Inside the Whale,’ about modernism, the nineteen-thirties, Henry Miller, and ‘Tropic of Cancer.’

For the first time in my life I tried whale. It was very chewy and quite fatty. My friend had had whale before, so I knew it would be quite blubbery. It was delicious. I loved it. It was smoked, so it had a lovely kind of tangy taste to it. We had it a couple of nights. I was won over. It was very yummy.

It’s really sad that you have more infomercials on TV to adopt a dog or a cat, or save a whale, then you do millions of flesh and blood human beings.

The Bible is full of dubious scientific impossibilities, from Jonah living inside a whale, to the sun standing still in the sky for Joshua.

As long as there is a Southern Ocean whale sanctuary, Sea Shepherd crew will continue to patrol and defend it.

My wife says I’m making a noise like a stranded whale. I think I have a major snoring problem.

I have a tattoo on my foot that says ‘it’s a whale’ in Japanese, because Japanese people kill whales. My stuffed whale was like most children’s teddy bear. I took it with me everywhere. I slept with it. I couldn’t live without my whale.

‘The Squid and the Whale’ was a really good movie.

Now that I finally have the time for it, this web surfing stuff turns out to be as interesting and fun and addictive as you’ve all been telling me. Zipping from link to link, chasing an idea across the noosphere, sucking up information like a killer whale – way cool.

Lots of business owners spend their lives trying to land the whale – the single, massive, brand-name account that will fatten the top line and bestow instant credibility. But big customers make me nervous.

To me extremism is targeting endangered whales in a whale sanctuary in violation of a moratorium. That, to me, is extreme.

Fundamentally, the way I work is exactly the same whether I’m making ‘Whale Rider’ or ‘Mulan’. And those two stories are somewhat similar. They have interesting parallels, and it felt like I’d really come full circle, back to a story of leadership.

I have these rhyme-based ideas because I love Julia Donaldson. ‘The Snail and the Whale’ is one of the most beautiful poems, and I feel like I could do that.

You watch ‘Whale Rider,’ and I defy you to not get teary-eyed at the end there.

He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.

Maori get pigeonholed into the idea they’re spiritual and telling stories like ‘Whale Rider’ and ‘Once Were Warriors,’ quite serious stuff, but we’re pretty funny people, and we never really have had an opportunity to show that side of ourselves, the clumsy, nerdy side of ourselves, which is something I am.

The thing about Moby Dick is that, at heart, it’s a very simple plot – there’s only one white whale in the ocean. When you’re a boy growing up in a hostile home, you imagine it’s unique: it’s happening only to you.

‘The Squid and the Whale’ I shot in 23 days. I would have loved more time for it at the time, but in some ways that kind of kamikaze way of shooting was right for that movie.

My daughter has probably gotten some benefit of being inspired by a woman who is willing to take on things. We travel. We travel to exotic places. I’m the first person to jump in the ocean with a whale. Even if I’m scared, I’ll do it anyway, because I never wanted her to see fear, especially when she was younger.

I go to the Natural History Museum and look at the cage of stuffed starlings there. But my favourite thing is the big blue whale. The scale of it is unbelievable, and makes you feel how insignificant you are as a human being.