50 Jellyfish Quotes about the Angels of the Sea

By Clifton Sankofa | Published July 12, 2023

Feed your aquatic curiosity with our jellyfish quotes!

Jellyfish are one of nature’s most misunderstood and sometimes maligned organisms.

Find out more about the nature of this enigmatic invertebrate with our jellyfish quotes.

What is a jellyfish?

They are beautiful gelatinous creatures who float on ocean currents.

Jellyfish are aquatic organisms that belong to the Cnidaria phylum.

Cnidae is a Greek word that means to sting.

This group includes sea anemones, reef-building corals, gorgonians, alcyons, and jewel coral.

Check out our jellyfish facts below:

Jellyfish eat and poop from the same place
Jellyfish existed before dinosaurs, fungi, and trees
Despite not having bones, jellyfish fossils dated back 700 million years ago.

Why are jellyfish excellent survivors?

Well, first of all, about seventy-five percent of jellyfish are invisible to the naked eye.

You cannot catch what you cannot see.

This gives the jellyfish an advantage over predators and prey alike.

When you think of powerful animals, you may think of sharks, whales, gorillas, or rhinos.

The jellyfish does not possess a fraction of the power these creatures exude.

So how have jellyfish been around for so long?

What makes them such skilled survivors?

Before even the simplest life existed, there were jellyfish.

Jellies predate many flora and fauna on our planet.

During the Permian-Triassic extinction event, over seventy percent of life on Earth was wiped out.

Guess who survived worldwide extinction and annihilation?

Jellyfish, that’s who!

About two thousand species of jellyfish have been identified, but scientists suggest there could be over 300,000 varieties!

Perhaps it’s the jellyfish’s genius design.

Mother nature organized this animal like an umbrella, letting its body hang over manubrium ended by the mouth and tentacles.

Why do jellyfish sting?

Jellyfish sting for survival and out of curiosity.

Swimmers dislike jellyfish because they can cause physical harm and sometimes death.

The jellyfish uses its cnidocyte to inject its prey or unaware swimmers with a mini-harpoon that carries a toxic venom.

Part of the genius of this design is that even as the cnidocytes are lost on the pretty, new cells regenerate every twenty-four hours.

This is why jellyfish stings are painful for so long.

To learn more, check out our jellyfish quotes below.

Short jellyfish quotes

Check out these quick and dirty quotes about jellyfish.

1. “Life is a beautiful, magnificent thing, even to a jellyfish.” — Charlie Chaplin

2. “Truth on our level is a different thing from truth for the jellyfish.” — T. S. Eliot

3. “Who’s going to rob us? A crackhead crab? A jellyfish junkie?” — Kathy Reichs

4. “South Africa is not a jellyfish and is in many respects a swordfish.” — P. W. Botha

5. “And no one eats jellyfish with chips and mushy peas. Get rid of ’em!” — Karl Pilkington

6. “Trying to make order out of my life was like trying to pick up a jellyfish.” — Gene Tierney

7. “We are all jellyfish, too pitiful and too afraid of being disliked, to be honest.” — May Sarton

8. “I’ve never been hurt by a sea creature, except for jellyfish and sea urchins.” — Peter Benchley

9. “When you move like a jellyfish, rhythm is nothing. You go with the flow. You don’t stop.” — Jack Johnson

10. “I don’t like jellyfish; they’re not a fish, they’re just a blob. They don’t have eyes, fins or scales like a cod.” — Karl Pilkington

The best jellyfish quotes about the angels of the sea

Here are some of the best jellyfish quotes out there.

11. “Without fake tan, I have the skin tones of a dead jellyfish.” — Jenny Eclair

12. “The Internet is like a giant jellyfish. You can’t step on it. You can’t go around it. You’ve got to get through it.” — John Evans

13. “The fact that jellyfish have survived for 650 million years without brains should give hope to some people.” — Karel Dekyvere

14. “Nature has provided two great gifts: life and then the diversity of living things, jellyfish and humans, worms and crocodiles.” — Theodore Holmes Bullock

15. “The universe went on as before, the planet went on as before. Man’s appearance caused no more stir than the appearance of jellyfish.” — Daniel Quinn

16. “Orchestras have often been used to conjure up the natural world: Swans, sharks, trout, but not, as far as I know, the often maligned jellyfish.” — Bill Bailey

17. “The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish drying on sand.” — Margaret Atwood

18. “[Jellyfish] are 97% water or something, so how much are they doing? Just give them another 3% and make them water. It’s more useful.” — Karl Pilkington

19. “What better way to learn about life in the ocean–and how we are changing it than through stories of blind zombie worms, immortal jellyfish, and unicorns of the sea?” — Enric Sala

20. “Nest of Soviet fellow travelers clacking busybodies in a Soviet jellyfish front, sitting here in Leesburg oozing out their funny little propaganda and making nuisances of themselves.” — Lyndon LaRouche

The top jellyfish quotes about nature’s jello-like creatures

Anatomically, jellyfish are some of the most fascinating creatures on the planet.

21. “It would be spiteful to put a Jellyfish in a trifle.” — Karl Pilkington

22. “I’d like to be a jellyfish, ’cause jellyfish don’t pay rent.” — Jimmy Buffett

23. “The jellyfish don’t actively move anywhere – it’s just moved with the tides.” — Andrew Buchan

24. “My angels are jellyfish, electric, nearly invisible, armed with poisoned harpoons.” — Eric Gamalinda

25. “My philosophy is to float like a jellyfish and let the market push me where it wants to go.” — Stuart Walton

26. “A person without conviction is a weak, jellyfish type of individual who mindlessly follows the crowd.” — Rick Warren

27. “Today, I saw cancer, cigarettes, and shortness of breath. This is why I walk to the ocean. Swim with sharks and jellyfish.” — Ryan Ross

28. “I think life is a bit of what you make it and a little smidgen of you being the jellyfish, and the tides just gently helping you along.” — Andrew Buchan

29. “A lot of athletes have this sort of invincibility: The jellyfish should worry about me. I don’t worry about them. I’ll just swim right through them.” — Diana Nyad

30. “I am a disaster magnet. I came home from our first-anniversary vacation with jellyfish stings, a puncture wound from a wrought iron pineapple, and a cork-shaped bruise in my cleavage.” — Molly Harper

Popular jellyfish quotes from ocean lovers

Jellyfish have a nasty reputation for stinging humans, but some people love them.

31. “You are a jellyfish.” — Paul Murphy

32. “You can’t catch a jellyfish.” — Lucy DeCoutere

33. “I thought beforehand, if Henein is going to be a shark, “I’m going to be a jellyfish.” — Lucy DeCoutere

34. “If we don’t manage this resource, we will be left with a diet of jellyfish and plankton stew.” — Daniel Pauly

35. “Agachak resisted a powerful urge to change this half-wit into a toad or perhaps a jellyfish.” — David Eddings

36. “Jellyfish serve as a model for bioengineers for the same reason yeast were once so valuable to geneticists: they’re simple to deconstruct.” — Jeffrey Kluger

37. “A jellyfish is little more than a pulsating bell, a tassel of trailing tentacles and a single digestive opening through which it both eats and excretes as regrettable an example of economy of design as ever was.” — Jeffrey Kluger

38. “We’ve survived raging rivers, men with spears, dehydration, the Triggers, oceanic storms, jellyfish stings, Pandora Wars, hypothermia, avalanches. We’ve come out the other side alive and bitter. We want the Cure. And we want revenge.” — Victoria Scott

39. “How remarkable we are in our ability to hide things from ourselves – our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds, jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding.” — Andrew Sean Greer

40. “The Word, till then a denominating aspect of the Thing, has suddenly become detached from it and is perceived as a glittering entity, transparent and unseizable as a jellyfish, yet able to create an independent world that is both more recondite and more instantaneously convincing than the world one knew before.” — Sylvia Townsend Warner

Jellyfish quotes about life

Check out these insightful jellyfish quotes.

41. “Im the jellyfish in the depths that will sting you.” — Inspectah Deck

42. “The real world is a much darker and deeper place than this, and much of it is occupied by jellyfish and things.” — Haruki Murakami

43. “The U.S. was the immigration country of choice even for alien jellyfish things that turned humans into scary monsters.” — Gini Koch

44. “The FA would remove him tomorrow if they had a spine, but clearly, in former lives, were cruel to jellyfish, which is why they have returned as them now.” — Martin Samuel

45. “If students were required to drop their questions, that would create armies of zombies- rows of jellyfish. The questioning mind is absolutely necessary.” — Chogyam Trungpa

46. “Not only was I exiled, paralyzed, mute, half deaf, deprived of all pleasures, and reduced to the existence of a jellyfish, but I was also horrible to behold.” — Jean-Dominique Bauby

47. “You need to sting the threats to your relationship, and if you need to sting him in the process, you gotta sting him.” — Paul Murphy

48. “You don’t approach the beautiful girl at the bar because you automatically assume she’s out of your league, you’d rather jump in a swimming pool filled with jellyfish than tell a woman that you have feelings for her, etc.” — Jason Mulgrew

49. “In the creative process, my ego has always been a huge tyrant, a dictator, and kind of rude and very misleading, because sometimes, when I’m doing something, I say, ‘This is great! This is fantastic! Very genius!’ And 20 minutes later, I feel like a dead jellyfish.” — Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

50. “There is a very common, though also very silly, picture of Kant according to which as empirical beings we are not free at all, and we are free only as noumenal jellyfish floating about in an intelligible sea above the heavens, outside any context in which our supposedly “free” choices could have any conceivable human meaning or significance.” — Allen W. Wood