Jules Verne Quotes

Two men were promenading up and down

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

Hope is so firmly rooted in the heart of man!

And Pencroft returned to his work, not without uttering a sigh of regret, for every sailor is a born fisherman, and if the pleasure of fishing is in exact proportion to the size of the animal, one can judge how a whaler feels in sight of a whale.

It was all very well for an Englishman like Mr. Fogg to make the tour of the world with a carpet-bag; a lady could not be expected to travel comfortably under such conditions.

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

Such were the loud and startling words which resounded through the air, above the vast watery desert of the Pacific, about four o'clock in the evening of the 23rd of March, 1865.

All that is impossible remains to be accomplished.

His tales took on the form of an epic poem, and I felt I was hearing some Canadian Homer reciting his Iliad of the High Arctic regions.

During the years following his capital was doubled, owing to the creation of a new commerce, which might be called The Coolie trade of the New World.

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

I am the law, and I am the judge!

The cold, increased by the tremendous speed, deprived them of the power of speech.

Though sleep is called our best friend, it is a friend who often keeps us waiting!

But I am letting myself be carried away by reveries which I must now put aside. Enough of these phantasies.

You are going to visit the land of marvels.

A true Englishman never jokes when he has a stake depending on the matter.

But to find, all at once, right before your eyes, that the impossible had been mysteriously achieved by man himself: this staggers the mind!

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.

I can undertake and persevere even without hope of success.

Far better to be the simplest pedestrian, with knapsack on back, stick in hand, and gun on shoulder, than an Indian prince travelling with all the ceremonial which his rank requires.

Scent is the soul of flowers, and sea flowers, as splendid as they may be, have no soul!

Anything capable of being imagined will one day be made reality.

Man, a mere inhabitant of the earth, cannot overstep its boundaries! But though he is confined to its crust, he may penetrate into all its secrets.

My house is small, but may heaven grant that it is never full of friends.

The Great Architect of the universe built it of good firm stuff.

The game was in his eyes a contest, a struggle with a difficulty, yet a motionless, unwearying struggle, congenial to his tastes.

Man is so constituted that health is a purely negative state. Hunger once satisfied, it is difficult for a man to imagine the horrors of starvation; they cannot be understood without being felt.

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.

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!

You have plenty of time; it's only twelve o'clock."

Passepartout pulled out his big watch. "Twelve!" he exclaimed; "why, it's only eight minutes before ten."

"Your watch is slow."

"My watch? A family watch, monsieur, which has come down from my great-grandfather! It doesn't vary five minutes in the year. It's a perfect chronometer, look you."

"I see how it is," said Fix. "You have kept London time, which is two hours behind that of Suez. You ought to regulate your watch at noon in each country."

"I regulate my watch? Never!"

"Well, then, it will not agree with the sun."

"So much the worse for the sun, monsieur. The sun will be wrong, then!

Oysters are the only food that never causes indigestion. Indeed, a man would have to eat sixteen dozen of these acephalous molluscs in order to gain the 315 grammes of nitrogen he requires daily.

Better to put things at the worst at first and reserve the best for a surprise.

It is only when you suffer that you really understand.

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

An English criminal, you know is always better concealed in London than anywhere else.

Thus the terrible insurrection was crushed. Tantia Topee, betrayed by his lieutenant Man-Singh, and condemned to death, was executed on the 15th of April, at Sipfee. This rebel, "this truly remarkable actor in the great drama of the Indian insurrection," says M. de Valbezen, "and one who gave proofs of a political genius full of resources and daring," died courageously on the scaffold. This

Many come to seek fortunes who only find trouble and sorrow, and then they throw the blame on chance, and forget the true cause is their own idleness and vice and want of commonsense. Whoever is sober and industrious, honest and economical, gets on.

It is never worth while to do anything by halves.

One's native land!―there should one live! there die!

I have always fancied that the end of the world will be when some enormous boiler, heated to three thousand millions of atmospheric pressure, shall explode and blow up the globe ... They [the Americans] are great boilermakers.

Look with all your eyes, look.

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

Are we rising again?" "No. On the contrary." "Are we descending?" "Worse than that, captain! we are falling!

And this accident came about ... ?Through nature's unpredictability not man's incapacity. No errors were committed in our maneuvers. Nevertheless, we can't prevent a loss of balance from taking its toll. One may defy human laws, but no one can withstand the laws of nature.

This lucid explanation of the phenomena we had witnessed appeared to me quite satisfactory. However great and mighty the marvels of nature may seem to us, they are always to be explained by physical reasons. Everything is subordinate to some great law of nature.

I am inclined to think that the people who landed on this coast were only here a very short time ago,

CHAPTER VII Geometrical Details. - Calculation of the Capacity of the Balloon. - The Double Receptacle. - The Covering. - The Car. - The Mysterious Apparatus. - The Provisions and Stores. - The Final Summing up.

Everything, it said, was against the travellers, every obstacle imposed alike by man and by nature. A miraculous agreement of the times of departure and arrival, which was impossible, was absolutely necessary to his success. He might, perhaps, reckon on the arrival of trains at the designated hours, in Europe, where the distances were relatively moderate; but when he calculated upon crossing India in three days, and the United States in seven, could he rely beyond misgiving upon accomplishing his task? There were accidents to machinery, the liability of trains to run off the line, collisions, bad weather, the blocking up by snow - were not all these against Phileas Fogg? Would he not find himself, when travelling by steamer in winter, at the mercy of the winds and fogs?

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

In the memory of the dead all chronological differences are effaced.

Now, if the question were to destroy a lion, a tiger, a cat, a hyena, I could understand it; but to deprive an antelope or a gazelle of life, to no other purpose than the gratification of your instincts as a sportsman, seems hardly worth the trouble.

Civilization never recedes; the law of necessity ever forces it onwards.

An Englishman does not joke about such an important matter as a bet.

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?

The possession of wealth leads almost inevitably to its abuse. It is the chief, if not the only, cause of evils which desolate this world below. The thirst for gold is responsible for the most regrettable lapses into sin.

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

Powder is but a thing of yesterday, and war is as old as the human race
unhappily.

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

In the way this strange gentleman was going on, he would leave the world without having done any good to himself or anybody else.

The sole precoccupation of this learned society was the destruction of humanity for philanthropic reasons and the perfection of weapons as instruments of civilization.

The superb grottoes or caves of Adjuntah, which rival those of Ellora, and perhaps in general beauty surpass them, occupy the lower end of a small valley about half a mile from the town.

When science has sent forth her fiat - it is only to hear and obey.

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

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

THEY'D CHANGE THE AXIS OF THE EARTH!

There are fortunes to be made in polar real estate! Just change the climate of both poles, warm them up, give them mild winters and pleasant summers, and watch the boom! At the same time, cool off the tropics, clear out the jungles, and there's billions more in it!

That was the scheme of the famous Gun Club, the same space engineers who had fired the shot "From the Earth to the Moon." The story of how they planned to change the face of the Earth itself is a Jules Verne classic long out of print that's a delight to read and a real adventure in logical super-science.

Everybody knows that the great reversed triangle of land, with its base in the north and its apex in the south, which is called India, embraces fourteen hundred thousand square miles, upon which

I am the Colombus of this nether world!
Dr. Leidenbrock

It must be that a man who shuts himself up between four walls must lose the faculty of associating ideas and words.

It is said that the night brings counsel, but it is not said that the counsel is necessarily good.

to the poet, a pearl is a tear of the sea

I don't think a being endowed with will-power should ever despair,as long as his hear beats.

It is better for us to see the destination we wish to reach, than the point of departure

One friend is always sacrificed to the other in friendship.

Our principle is, that books, instead of growing mouldy behind an iron grating, should be worn out under the eyes of many readers.

My uncle wasted a great deal of breath in giving him directions, but worthy Hans took not the slightest notice of his words.

Thus were formed those immense coalfields, which nevertheless, are not inexhaustible, and which three centuries at the present accelerated rate of consumption will exhaust unless the industrial world will devise a remedy.

I am very bad at expressing tender sentiments. The very word 'love' frightens me.

An energetic man will succeed where an indolent one would vegetate and inevitably perish.

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.

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

When you bring a man two millions of money, you need have but little fear that you will not be well received.

Mobilis in Mobile

He must have travelled everywhere, at least in the spirit.

Though, by a just turn-about of things here below, Great Britain has become a colony of the United States, the English are not yet reconciled to the situation.

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

We now know most things that can be measured in this world, except the bounds of human ambition!

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?

It is certain that the inanimate objects by which you are surrounded have a direct action on the brain.

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

Anything a man can imagine, another can create

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.

You seize sentiment better when you get clear of nature. You breathe it in every sense!

That terrible avenger, a perfect archangel of hatred.

A cow peacefully grazing fifty yards away received one of the bullets in her back. She had nothing to do with the quarrel all the same.

After Simla, I must mention Darjeeling, with its pretty white houses, overlooked by Mount Kinchinjinga, 312 miles to the north of Calcutta, 6,900 feet above the level of the sea, about the eighty-sixth degree of longitude, and the twenty-seventh degree of latitude - a charming situation, in the most beautiful country in the world. Other

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

Science, my boy, is composed of errors, but errors that it is right to make, for they lead step by step to the truth.

Enough. When science has spoken, it is for us to hold our peace. -Lidenbrock

Allahabad, that is, the City of God, one of the most venerated in India, being built at the junction of the two sacred rivers, Ganges and Jumna, the waters of which attract pilgrims from every part of the peninsula. The Ganges, according to the legends of the Ramayana, rises in heaven, whence, owing to Brahma's agency, it descends to the earth.