Quote collection
151 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Great robbers always resemble honest folk. 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 colonists had no library at their disposal; but the engineer was a book which was always at hand, always open at the page which one wanted, a book which answered all their questions, and which they often consulted."
"One's native land!?there should one live! there die!"
"I am nothing to you but Captain Nemo; and you and your companions are nothing to me but the passengers of the Nautilus."
"What use are the best of arguments when they can be destroyed by force?"
"Wherever he saw a hole he always wanted to know the depth of it. To him this was important."
"Solitude, isolation, are painful things, and beyond human endurance."
"I would have bartered a diamond mine for a glass of pure spring water!"
"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."
"An English criminal, you know is always better concealed in London than anywhere else."
"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!"
"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."
"Man is never perfect nor contented."
"In lighthearted countries, people joked about this phenomenon, but such serious, practical countries as England, America, and Germany were deeply concerned."
"Scent is the soul of flowers, and sea flowers, as splendid as they may be, have no soul!"
"As for Phileas Fogg, it seemed just as if the typhoon were a part of his programme"
"From the moment they had left the Earth, their own weight, and that of the Projectile and the objects therein contained, had been undergoing a progressive diminution. . . . Of course, it is quite clear, that this decrease could not be indicated by an ordinary scales, as the weight to balance the object would have lost precisely as much as the object itself. But a spring balance, for instance, in which the tension of the coil is independent of attraction, would have readily given the exact equivalent of the loss."
"[we see that] science is eminently perfectible, and that each theory has constantly to give way to a fresh one."
"Well, gentlemen, do you believe in the possibility of aerial locomotion by machines heavier than air? ... You ask yourselves doubtless if this apparatus, so marvellously adapted for aerial locomotion, is susceptible of receiving greater speed. It is not worth while to conquer space if we cannot devour it. I wanted the air to be a solid support to me, and it is. I saw that to struggle against the wind I must be stronger than the wind, and I am."
"Science, my boy, is composed of errors, but errors that it is right to make, for they lead step by step to the truth."