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

A scholar has to know a little of everything.

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

Why lower oneself to taking pride from being American or British, when you can boast of being man!

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

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

What I’d like to be above all is a writer.

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?

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

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.

The human mind delights in grand conceptions of supernatural beings.

I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, of an intensity of which coal is not capable.

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

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

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

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

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?

Government machinery has been described as a marvelous labor saving device which enables ten men to do the work of one.

Man is such a wondrous being that it is never possible to count up all his merits at once. The more you study him, the more new particulars appear, and their description would be endless.

Nobody can teach me who I am. You can describe parts of me, but who I am – and what I need – is something I have to find out myself.

Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description.

The most beautiful description of a woman is by understatement.

Family does not necessarily mean blood relatives but often a description of a community, organisation or nation.

Romance and novel paint beauty in colors more charming than nature, and describe a happiness that humans never taste. How deceptive and destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss!

One cannot be too careful in the selection of adjectives for descriptions. Words or compounds which describe precisely, and which convey exactly the right suggestions to the mind of the reader, are essential.