Man's constitution is so peculiar that his health is purely a negative matter. No sooner is the rage of hunger appeased than it becomes difficult to comprehend the meaning of starvation. It is only when you suffer that you really understand.
— Jules Verne
It is certain that the inanimate objects by which you are surrounded have a direct action on the brain.
Solitude, isolation, are painful things and beyond human endurance.
Civilization never recedes; the law of necessity ever forces it onwards.
An energetic man will succeed where an indolent one would vegetate and inevitably perish.
The sea does not belong to despots. Upon its surface men can still exercise unjust laws, fight, tear one another to pieces, and be carried away with terrestrial horrors. But at thirty feet below its level, their reign ceases, their influence is quenched, and their power disappears.
It may be taken for granted that, rash as Americans usually are, when they are prudent, there is good reason for it.
Everybody knows that England is the world of betting men, who are of a higher class than mere gamblers: to bet is in the English temperament.
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.
We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones.
On the morrow the horizon was covered with clouds- a thick and impenetrable curtain between earth and sky, which unhappily extended as far as the Rocky Mountains. It was a fatality!
How many persons condemned to the horrors of solitary confinement have gone mad - simply because the thinking faculties have lain dormant!
When science has sent forth her fiat - it is only to hear and obey.
One's native land! There should one live! There die!
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.
Well, my friend, this earth will one day be that cold corpse; it will become uninhabitable and uninhabited like the moon, which has long since lost all its vital heat.
The sea is the vast reservoir of Nature. The globe began with sea, so to speak; and who knows if it will not end with it?
Trains, like time and tide, stop for no one.
A true Englishman doesn't joke when he is talking about so serious a thing as a wager.
Liberty is worth paying for.
The Nautilus was piercing the water with its sharp spur, after having accomplished nearly ten thousand leagues in three months and a half, a distance greater than the great circle of the earth. Where were we going now, and what was reserved for the future?
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 is spread unequally a population of one hundred and eighty millions of souls.
It must be that a man who shuts himself up between four walls must lose the faculty of associating ideas and words.
In presence of Nature's grand convulsions, man is powerless.
He who is mistaken in an action which he sincerely believes to be right may be an enemy, but retains our esteem.
Man is never perfect nor contented.
Before all masters, necessity is the one most listened to, and who teaches the best.
The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence.
Fellows who have rascally faces have only one course to take, and that is to remain honest; otherwise, they would be arrested off-hand.
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.
I believe cats to be spirits come to earth. A cat, I am sure, could walk on a cloud without coming through.
We were alone. Where, I could not say, hardly imagine. All was black, and such a dense black that, after some minutes, my eyes had not been able to discern even the faintest glimmer.
