“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.”

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?

Well, I feel that we should always put a little art into what we do. It’s better that way.

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.

I say, you do have a heart!” “Sometimes,” he replied, “when I have the time.

I wanted to see what no one had yet observed, even if I had to pay for this curiosity with my life.

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