  We use a gray molasses operating on the D$_1$ atomic transition to produce
degenerate quantum gases of $^{6}$Li with a large number of atoms. This
sub-Doppler cooling phase allows us to lower the initial temperature of 10$^9$
atoms from 500 to 40 $\mu$K in 2 ms. We observe that D$_1$ cooling remains
effective into a high-intensity infrared dipole trap where two-state mixtures
are evaporated to reach the degenerate regime. We produce molecular
Bose-Einstein condensates of up to 5$\times$10$^{5}$ molecules and
weakly-interacting degenerate Fermi gases of $7\times$10$^{5}$ atoms at
$T/T_{F}<0.1$ with a typical experimental duty cycle of 11 seconds.
