Twenty Thousand Leagues Quotes

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.

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

The human mind delights in grand conceptions of supernatural beings.

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

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

Mobilis in Mobile

If his destiny be strange, it is also sublime.

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

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

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

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

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

I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle. From the minute I reached our house, I started to read. Every book I seized on, from “Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Camp Rest-a-While” to “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” stood for the devouring wish to read being instantly granted. I knew this was bliss, knew it at the time. Taste isn’t nearly so important; it comes in its own time.

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.

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

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!

No sir, it is evidently a gigantic narwhal

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

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.

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.

What!You know German?

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

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

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.

Walls were invented simply to frustrate scientists. All walls should be banned.

Like snails, we were fixed to our shells, and I declare it is easy to lead a snail's life.

It was marvellous, a feast for the eyes, this complication of coloured tints, a perfect kaleidoscope of green, yellow, orange, violet, indigo, and blue; in one word, the whole palette of an enthusiastic colourist!

That Indian, sir, is an inhabitant of an oppressed country; and I am still, and shall be, to my last breath, one of them!

I declare it is easy to lead a snail's life.

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?

I looked at his intelligent forehead, furrowed with premature wrinkles, produced probably by misfortune and sorrow. I tried to learn the secret of his life from the last words that escaped his lips.

Conseil: If that is the case, this dugong may well be the last of its race, and perhaps it would be better to spare it, in the interest of science. Ned Land: Perhaps it will be better to hunt it, in the interest of the kitchen.

The thunderbolt without the reverberations of thunder would frighten man but little, though the danger lies in the lightning, not in the noise.

I wanted to protect my professorial dignity and not lay myself open to laughter from the Americans, who when they do laugh, laugh raucously

Where others have failed, I will not fail.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," translated Florent. "By Jules Verne. This book I have not read in many years." "We're reading it in French class," Joseph said. "It's hard to understand, but I found a line that Uncle Albert would love." Florent opened to a dog-eared page where Joseph had underlined a sentence and written the translation in the margin. Florent read it out loud. "'Let me tell you, Professor, that you will not regret the time spent on board. You are going to travel in a a land of marvels.

The human mind delights in grand conceptions of supernatural beings. And the sea is precisely their best vehicle, the only medium through which these giants (against which terrestrial animals, such as elephants or rhinoceroses, are as nothing) can be produced or developed.

Wait a few minutes, our lantern will be lit, and, if you like light places, you will be satisfied.

I felt that my true vocation, the sole end of my life, was to chase this disturbing monster and purge it from the world.

From a caprice of nature, not from the ignorance of man. Not a mistake has been made in the working. But we cannot prevent equilibrium from producing its effects. We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones.

these words of wisdom, so rarely understood: "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill towards men.

Yes, forgotten by all else, but not by us.

Almighty God! enough! enough!

I discovered it, ventured into it, and before long, sir, you too will have passed through my Arabian tunnel!

Now we are seeing the disadvantage of not knowing every language," said Conseil "or is it the disadvantage of not having a universal language?

No one has ever seen anything like it; but the sight may cost us dear. And, if I must say all, I think we are seeing here things which God never intended man to see.

I am the law, and I am the judge!

Adieu, sun! Disappear, thou radiant orb! rest beneath this open sea, and let a night of six months spread its shadows over my new domains!

The earth doesn't need new continents, but new men!

These composers," Captain Nemo answered me, "are the contemporaries of Orpheus, because in the annals of the dead, all chronological differences fade; and

If his destiny be strange, it is also sublime. Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

And then what?” she says, pulling her hand from Grom’s grasp. “Then Grom will mate with Mom and live happily ever after twenty thousand leagues under the sea?

May the judge disappear, and the philosopher continue the peaceful exploration of the sea! If his destiny be strange, it is also sublime. Have I not understood it myself? Have I not lived ten months of this unnatural life? And to the question asked by Ecclesiastes three thousand years ago, "That which is far off and exceeding deep, who can find it out?" two men alone of all now living have the right to give an answer—— CAPTAIN NEMO AND MYSELF.

I suppose that, after visiting the curious coasts of Arabia and Egypt, the Nautilus will go down the Indian Ocean again, perhaps cross the Channel of Mozambique, perhaps off the Mascarenhas, so as to gain the Cape of Good Hope.

Your arguments at rotten at the foundation. You speak in the future, ' We shall be there! We shall be here!' I speak in the present,'We are here, and we must profit by it.

Ah! sir, live—live in the bosom of the waters! There only is independence! There I recognise no masters! There I am free!

Some of these tusks have been found buried in the bodies of whales, which the unicorn always attacks with success.

His countenance had resumed its habitual imperturbability.

The devil!" exclaimed Ned.

Curious anomaly, fantastic element!" said an ingenious naturalist, "in which the animal kingdom blossoms, and the vegetable does not!

you must never make snap judgments about your fellow man.

if the seas were cleaned of whales and seals. Then, infested with poulps, medusae, and cuttle-fish, they would become immense centres of infection, since

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,' as one of your poets has said.

11,340 miles, or 5,250 French leagues,

that before long chance would betray the captain's secrets. The next day, the 1st of June, the Nautilus continued the same

The year 1866 was signalised by a remarkable incident, a mysterious and puzzling phenomenon, which doubtless no one has yet forgotten.

The latter seemed to be a victim to some emotion that he tried in vain to repress.

From the same cause, the idea of a floating hull of an enormous wreck was given up.

Nautron respoc lorni virch.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised; but I will not be eaten without protest!

is this man, all things considered, to be hated or admired? Is he a victim or a killer?

Then a door opened into a kitchen nine feet long, situated between the large store-rooms. There electricity, better than gas itself, did all the cooking.

As to classing it in the list of fables, the idea was out of the question.

The human mind enjoys impressive visions of unearthly creatures.

Help!" This was my last cry. My mouth filled with water, I struggled against being drawn the abyss. Suddenly my clothes were seized by a strong hand, and I felt myself quickly drawn up to the surface of the sea; and I heard, yes, I heard these words pronounced in my ear: "If master would be so good as to lean on my shoulder, master would swim with much greater ease." I seized with one hand my faithful Conseil's arm. "Is it you?" said I, "you?" "Myself," answered Conseil; "and waiting master's orders." "That shock threw you as well as me in the sea?" "No; but, being in my master's service, I followed him." The worthy fellow thought that was but natural.

There’s an island over there. On that island there are trees. Under those trees there are animals carrying around chops and roast beefs, and I wouldn’t mind a bit sinking my teeth into a little good meat.

I learned to read at the age of five, in Brother Justiniano's class at the De la Salle Academy in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It is the most important thing that has ever happened to me. Almost seventy years later I remember clearly how the magic of translating the words in books into images enriched my life, breaking the barriers of time and space and allowing me to travel with Captain Nemo twenty thousand leagues under the sea, fight with d'Artagnan, Athos, Portos, and Aramis against the intrigues threatening the Queen in the days of the secretive Richelieu, or stumble through the sewers of Paris, transformed into Jean Valjean carrying Marius's inert body on my back.

An oyster has even been cited, although I permit myself to doubt this, which contained no less than 150 sharks.’ ‘A hundred and fifty sharks!’ exclaimed Ned. ‘Did I say sharks!’ I said quickly. ‘I mean 150 pearls. Sharks would make no sense.

Il mare è tutto. Copre i sette decimi del globo terrestre. Il suo respiro è puro e sano. È l'immenso deserto dove l'uomo non è mai solo, poiché sente fremere la vita accanto a sé. Il mare non è altro che il veicolo di un'esistenza soprannaturale e prodigiosa; non è che movimento e amore, è l'infinito vivente...

Old books that we have known but not possessed cross our path and invite themselves over. New books try to seduce us daily with tempting titles and tantalizing covers. Families beg to be united: volume XVIII of the Complete Works of Lope de Vega is announced in a catalogue, calling to the other seventeen that sit, barely leafed through, on my shelf. How fortunate for Captain Nemo to be able to say, during his twenty-thousand-league journey under the sea, that ‘the world ended for me the day when my Nautilus sank underwater for the first time. On that day I bought my last volumes, my last pamphlets, my last periodicals, and since then, it is for me as if humanity no longer thought nor wrote a single word.’ But for readers like myself, there are no ‘last’ purchases this side of the grave.

The year 1866 was signalised by a remarkable incident, a mysterious and puzzling phenomenon, which doubtless no one has yet forgotten. Not to mention rumours which agitated the maritime population and excited the public mind, even in the interior of continents, seafaring men were particularly excited. Merchants, common sailors, captains of vessels, skippers, both of Europe and America, naval officers of all countries, and the Governments of several States on the two continents, were deeply interested in the matter. For some time past vessels had been met by "an enormous thing," a long object, spindle-shaped, occasionally phosphorescent, and infinitely larger and more rapid in its movements than a whale. The facts relating to this apparition (entered in various log-books) agreed in most respects as to the shape of the object or creature in question, the untiring rapidity of its movements, its surprising power of locomotion, and the peculiar life with which it seemed endowed. If it was a whale, it surpassed in size all those hitherto classified in science. Taking into consideration the mean of observations made at divers times—rejecting the timid estimate of those who assigned to this object a length of two hundred feet, equally with the exaggerated opinions which set it down as a mile

been so much talked of, even through the Atlantic cable, that jesters pretended that this slender fly had stopped a telegram on its passage and was making the most of it. So when the frigate had been armed for a long campaign, and provided with formidable fishing apparatus, no one could tell what course to pursue. Impatience grew apace, when,

Strabo

qui vive

Sesostris,

je comprenais enfin que ma véritable vocation, l'unique but de ma vie, était de chasser ce monstre inquiétant

THE GRECIAN ARCHIPELAGO

Only one observation—just one. The occasion must be serious, and our first attempt must succeed; if it fails, we shall never find another,

I wanted to protect my scholarly reputation and not be the laughing stock of America, where people enjoy a hearty laugh.

(...) la fuerza creadora de la naturaleza supera al instinto destructivo del hombre.

At least there, Captain, your dead can sleep quietly, beyond the reach of sharks!” “Yes,” Captain Nemo replied gravely, “beyond the reach of sharks and of men!

These are coral islands, slowly raised, but continuous, created by the daily work of polypi. Then this new island will be joined later on to the neighboring groups, and a fifth continent will stretch from New Zealand and New Caledonia, and from thence to the Marquesas. One day, when I was suggesting this theory to Captain Nemo, he replied coldly: "The earth does not want new continents, but new men.

Curiously enough, all these books were not classified according to their language; and this lack of system implied that the captain of the Nautilus had little trouble in reading any of the volumes he might select.

(...) ―¿Y le asombra, señor profesor, haber encontrado salvajes al poner pie en tierra? ¿Y dónde no hay salvajes? Y estos que usted llama salvajes ¿son peores que los otros? ―Pero, capitán... ―Yo los he encontrado en todas partes.

A THOUSAND WORDS My stepfather Ralph Newman was a merry and remarkable man, a former minor league second baseman who broke his nose on a double play ball and wound up opening the Abraham Lincoln Bookshop in Chicago. He was also president of the Chicago Public Library. Ralph used to huff about that phrase, A picture is worth a thousand words and ask, "Does anyone really stop to figure out what you could do with a thousand words?" And, rather in the way that my daughters and I trade, try out, and create stories with each other, my stepfather and I spread out a napkin and came up with this: One picture is worth a thousand words? You give me a thousand words and I can give you: the Lord's Prayer, the Twenty-third Psalm, the Hippocratic Oath, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, the last graphs of Martin Luther King's speech to the March on Washington, and the final entry of Anne Frank's diary. You give me a thousand words, and I don't think I'd trade you for any picture on earth.

The most prominent word on the page was Bathyscaphe. “Get it?” the guy said. “A submarine,” Chang said. “Capable of going all the way to the ocean bed.” “Originally I called it Nemo. After the guy in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea. He commands a submarine named Nautilus. I liked him because nemo is Latin for nobody. Which seemed appropriate. But then they made a movie about a fish. Which ruined it.” He typed another command, and a search box came up. He said, “OK, start your engines. Thirty-two seconds is the wager.

¡El mar es todo! Cubre las siete décimas partes del globo terrestre. Su aliento es puro y sano. Es el inmenso desierto en el que el hombre no está nunca solo, pues siente estremecerse la vida en torno suyo. El mar es el vehículo de una sobrenatural y prodigiosa existencia; es movimiento y amor; es el infinito viviente.

question. On the 20th of July, 1866, the steamer Governor Higginson, of the Calcutta and Burnach Steam Navigation Company, had met this moving mass five miles off the east coast of Australia. Captain Baker thought at first that he was in the presence of an unknown sandbank; he even prepared to determine its exact position when two columns of water, projected by the mysterious object, shot with a hissing noise a hundred and fifty feet up into the air. Now, unless the sandbank had been submitted to the intermittent eruption of a geyser, the Governor Higginson had to do neither more nor less than with an aquatic mammal, unknown till then, which threw up from

An indisputable event, my gallant Ned. Accordingly, people have proposed naming this devil fish Bouguer's Squid. And how long was it? the Canadian asked. Didn't it measure about six metres? said Conseil, who was stationed at the window and examining anew the crevices in the cliff. Precisely, I replied Wasn't its head, Conseil went on, crowned by eight tentacles that quivered in the water like a nest of snakes? Precisely. Weren't its eyes prominently placed and considerably enlarged? Yes, Conseil. And wasn't its mouth a real parrot's beak but of fearsome size? Correct, Conseil. Well, with all due respect to master, Conseil replied serenely, if this isn't Bouguers Squid, it's at least one of his close relatives!