“Poets are like proverbs: you can always find one to contradict another.”

In presence of Nature’s grand convulsions man is powerless.

Before all masters, necessity is the one most listened to, and who teaches the best.

And whichsoever way thou goest, may fortune follow.

We see that science is eminently perfectible, and that each theory has constantly to give way to a fresh one.

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.

The next generation has always been and will be better than the previous one. If it is not, then the world would not be moving forward.

One who is in search of knowledge should give up the search of pleasure and the one who is in search of pleasure should give up the search of knowledge.

The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the superstition of the Christian religion.

In relationship there are always two types of person: one weaker and the other stronger one. It’s never easier to live being as weaker one!

I have often heard that the outstanding man is he who thinks deeply about a problem, and the next is he who listens carefully to advice.

The hardest goodbyes are the ones you never got to say.

Whether you do something or decide to do nothing, either way, you are making a moral choice. And I hope people make the right one.

Life just doesn’t care about our aspirations, or sadness. It’s often random, and it’s often stupid and it’s often completely unexpected, and the closures and the epiphanies and revelations we end up receiving from life, begrudgingly, rarely turn out to be the ones we thought.