Jules Verne Quotes

We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.

Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real.

Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.

A line comes back to Marie-Laure from Jules Verne: Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.

I believe cats to be spirits come to earth. A cat, I am sure, could walk on a cloud without coming through.

The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides. The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the Living Infinite.

We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones.

I say, you do have a heart!" "Sometimes," he replied, "when I have the time.

If there were no thunder, men would have little fear of lightning.

Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.

Science, my boy, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.

The chance which now seems lost may present itself at the last moment.

The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the ‘Living Infinite...

If only life were like a Jules Verne novel, thinks Marie-Laure, and you could page ahead when you most needed to, and learn what would happen.

The earth does not need new continents, but new men.

It seems wisest to assume the worst from the beginning...and let anything better come as a surprise.

While there is life there is hope. I beg to assert...that as long as a man's heart beats, as long as a man's flesh quivers, I do not allow that a being gifted with thought and will can allow himself to despair.

I see that it is by no means useless to travel, if a man wants to see something new

It is a great misfortune to be alone, my friends; and it must be believed that solitude can quickly destroy reason.

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

Before all masters, necessity is the one most listened to, and who teaches the best.

The human mind delights in grand conceptions of supernatural beings.

Why, you are a man of heart!" "Sometimes," replied Phileas Fogg, quietly. "When I have the time.

Aures habent et non audient` - `They have ears but hear not

I dream with my eyes open.

A true Englishman doesn't joke when he is talking about so serious a thing as a wager.

How many things have been denied one day, only to become realities the next!

I looked on, I thought, I reflected, I admired, in a state of stupefaction not altogether unmingled with fear!

Nature's creative power is far beyond man's instinct of destruction.

But what then? What had he really gained by all this trouble? What had he brought back from this long and weary journey? Nothing, you say? Perhaps so; nothing but a charming woman, who, strange as it may appear, made him the happiest of men! Truly, would you not for less than that make the tour around the world?

Mobilis in Mobile

Science, my lad, has been built upon many errors; but they are errors which it was good to fall into, for they led to the truth.

If his destiny be strange, it is also sublime.

And whichsoever way thou goest, may fortune follow.

The earth does not want new continents, but new men.

Well, I feel that we should always put a little art into what we do. It's better that way.

What use are the best of arguments when they can be destroyed by force?

As for difficulties," replied Ferguson, in a serious tone, "they were made to be overcome.

Your dead sleep quietly, at least, Captain, out of reach of sharks" "Yes, sir, of sharks and men.

There are no impossible obstacles; there are just stronger and weaker wills, that’s all!

[we see that] science is eminently perfectible, and that each theory has constantly to give way to a fresh one.

It may be taken for granted that, rash as the Americans are, when they are prudent there is good reason for it.

What pen can describe this scene of marvellous horror; what pencil can portray it?

Look with all your eyes, look.

However, everything has an end, everything passes away, even the hunger of people who have not eaten

If at every instant we may perish, so at every instant we may be saved.

A well-used minimum suffices for everything.

What one man can think, another man can do.

As long as the heart beats, as long as body and soul keep together, I cannot admit that any creature endowed with a will has need to despair of life.

Steam seems to have killed all gratitude in the hearts of sailors.

Is the Master out of his mind?' she asked me. I nodded. 'And he's taking you with him?' I nodded again. 'Where?' she asked. I pointed towards the centre of the earth. 'Into the cellar?' exclaimed the old servant. 'No,' I said, 'farther down than that.

It is only when you suffer that you really understand.

What darkness to you is light to me

Wherever he saw a hole he always wanted to know the depth of it. To him this was important.

I ask no more than to live a hundred years longer, that I may have more time to dwell the longer on your memory.

On the earth, even in the darkest night, the light never wholly abandons his rule. It is diffused and subtle, but little as may remain, the retina of the eye is sensible of it.

It's really useful to travel, if you want to see new things.

The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the 'Living Infinite'...The globe began with sea, so to speak; and who knows if it will not end with it? In it is supreme tranquility.

There is no more sagacious animal than the Icelandic horse. He is stopped by neither snow, nor storm, nor impassable roads, nor rocks, glaciers, or anything. He is courageous, sober, and surefooted. He never makes a false step, never shies. If there is a river or fjord to cross (and we shall meet with many) you will see him plunge in at once, just as if he were amphibious, and gain the opposite bank.

All great actions return to God, from whom they are derived.

I am not what you call a civilised man! I have done with society entirely, for reasons which I alone have the right of appreciating. I do not, therefore, obey its laws, and I desire you never to allude to them before me again!

In presence of Nature's grand convulsions man is powerless.

Ah! Women and young girls, how incomprehensible are your feminine hearts! When you are not the timidest, you are the bravest of creatures

With time and thought, one can do a good job.

It was obvious that the matter had to be settled, and evasions were distasteful to me.

No sir, it is evidently a gigantic narwhal

But Phileas Fogg, who was not traveling, but only describing a circumfrence,...

When I returned to partial life my face was wet with tears. How long that state of insensibility had lasted I cannot say. I had no means now of taking account of time. Never was solitude equal to this, never had any living being been so utterly forsaken.

I have been, am, in his service; I have seen his generosity and goodness; and I will never betray him-not for all the gold in the world. I have come from a village where they don't eat that kind of bread.

Oh, figures!' answered Ned. 'You can make figures do whatever you want.

Until I dicover the meaning of this sentence, I will neither eat nor sleep. "My dear uncle-" I began. "Nor you either," he added.

What a big book, captain, might be made with all that is known!" "And what a much bigger book still with all that is not known!

As for Phileas Fogg, it seemed just as if the typhoon were a part of his programme

Science fiction [is] the kind of writing that prepares us for the necessary mutations brought about in society from an ever changing technological world and as a result. The mainstream hasn’t excluded SF; the mainstream has excluded itself. No one told Jules Verne he was a science fiction writer, but he invented the 20th century.

The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and life-giving. It is an immense desert place where man is never lonely, for he senses the weaving of Creation on every hand. It is the physical embodiment of a supernatural existence... For the sea is itself nothing but love and emotion. It is the Living Infinite, as one of your poets has said. Nature manifests herself in it, with her three kingdoms: mineral, vegetable, and animal. The ocean is the vast reservoir of Nature.

Perfume is the soul of the flower, and sea-flowers have no soul.

A minimum put to good use is enough for anything.

Mr. Fogg played, not to win, but for the sake of playing.

Sir," replied the commander, "I am nothing to you but Captain Nemo; and you and your companions are nothing to me but the passengers of the Nautilus.

Solitude, isolation, are painful things, and beyond human endurance.

He who is mistaken in an action which he sincerely believes to be right may be an enemy, but retains our esteem.

What!You know German?

It is only when you suffer that you truly understand.

Savages!' he echoed, ironically. 'You set foot on one of the shores of this globe, professor, and you’re surprised to find savages? Where aren’t there savages? Besides, are they any worse than others, these whom you call savages?

God, if he believed in Him, and his conscience, if he had one, were the only judges to whom he was answerable.

What you do for money you do badly.

A scholar has to know a little of everything.

There is the disadvantage of not knowing all languages," said Conseil, "or the disadvantage of not having one universal language.

It is certain," exclaimed my uncle in a tone of triumph. "But silence, do you hear me? silence upon the whole subject; and let no one get before us in this design of discovering the centre of the earth.

Listen, we’ll come visit you. Okay? I’ll dress up as William Shakespeare, Lucent as Emily Dickinson, and beautiful ‘Ray’ as someone dashing and manly like Jules Verne or Ernest Hemingway...and we’ll write on your white-room walls. We’ll write you out of your supposed insanity. I love you, Micky Affias. -James (from "Descendants of the Eminent")

Captain Nemo pointed to this prodigious heap of shellfish, and I saw that these mines were genuinely inexhaustible, since nature's creative powers are greater than man's destructive instincts.

Man is never perfect, nor contended.

So is man's heart. The desire to perform a work which will endure, which will survive him, is the origin of his superiority over all other living creatures here below. It is this which has established his dominion, and this it is which justifies it, over all the world.

With its untold depths, couldn't the sea keep alive such huge specimens of life from another age, this sea that never changes while the land masses undergo almost continuous alteration? Couldn't the heart of the ocean hide the last–remaining varieties of these titanic species, for whom years are centuries and centuries millennia?

See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.” “Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco —” “That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.” “General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.” “No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.

However strange his destiny may be, it is also sublime! I myself have understood that much. Did I not also live this unnatural life for ten months? Thus, to that question asked six thousand years ago by Ecclesiastes, 'That which is far off, and exceedingly deep, who can find it out?' only two men now have the right to answer: Captain Nemo and myself.

Ah!" I cried, springing up. "But no! no! My uncle shall never know it. He would insist upon doing it too. He would want to know all about it. Ropes could not hold him, such a determined geologist as he is! He would start, he would, in spite of everything and everybody, and he would take me with him, and we should never get back. No, never! never!" My over-excitement was beyond all description.

Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry—English, Russian and French—than in any other five-year period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok. On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg, and Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library. At a later period, in Western Europe, between the ages of 20 and 40, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Norman Douglas, Bergson, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin. Of these top favorites, several—Poe, Jules Verne, Emmuska Orezy, Conan Doyle, and Rupert Brooke—have lost the glamour and thrill they held for me. The others remain intact and by now are probably beyond change as far as I am concerned.

Mr. Fogg accordingly tasted the dish, but, despite its spiced sauce, found it far from palatable. He rang for the landlord, and, on his appearance, said, fixing his clear eyes upon him, "Is this rabbit, sir?" "Yes, my lord," the rogue boldly replied, "rabbit from the jungles." "And this rabbit did not mew when he was killed?" "Mew, my lord! What, a rabbit mew! I swear to you—" "Be so good, landlord, as not to swear, but remember this: cats were formerly considered, in India, as sacred animals. That was a good time." "For the cats, my lord?" "Perhaps for the travellers as well!

Her shining tresses, divided in two parts, encircle the harmonious contour of her white and delicate cheeks, brilliant in their glow and freshness. Her ebony brows have the form and charm of the bow of Kama, the god of love, and beneath her long silken lashes the purest reflections and a celestial light swim, as in the sacred lakes of Himalaya, in the black pupils of her great clear eyes. Her teeth, fine, equal, and white, glitter between her smiling lips like dewdrops in a passion-flower's half-enveloped breast. Her delicately formed ears, her vermilion hands, her little feet, curved and tender as the lotus-bud, glitter with the brilliancy of the loveliest pearls of Ceylon, the most dazzling diamonds of Golconda. Her narrow and supple waist, which a hand may clasp around, sets forth the outline of her rounded figure and the beauty of her bosom, where youth in its flower displays the wealth of its treasures; and beneath the silken folds of her tunic she seems to have been modelled in pure silver by the godlike hand of Vicvarcarma, the immortal sculptor.