Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

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. The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the Living Infinite.

We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones.

If there were no thunder, men would have little fear of lightning.

The human mind delights in grand conceptions of supernatural beings.

Aures habent et non audient` - `They have ears but hear not

The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and life-giving. It is an immense desert place where man is never lonely, for he senses the weaving of Creation on every hand. It is the physical embodiment of a supernatural existence... For the sea is itself nothing but love and emotion. It is the Living Infinite, as one of your poets has said. Nature manifests herself in it, with her three kingdoms: mineral, vegetable, and animal. The ocean is the vast reservoir of Nature.

The earth does not want new continents, but new men.

Nature's creative power is far beyond man's instinct of destruction.

Steam seems to have killed all gratitude in the hearts of sailors.

Your dead sleep quietly, at least, Captain, out of reach of sharks" "Yes, sir, of sharks and men.

If his destiny be strange, it is also sublime.

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

The sea is only the embodiment of a supernatural and wonderful existence. It is nothing but love and emotion; it is the 'Living Infinite'...The globe began with sea, so to speak; and who knows if it will not end with it? In it is supreme tranquility.

No sir, it is evidently a gigantic narwhal

Oh, figures!' answered Ned. 'You can make figures do whatever you want.

It was obvious that the matter had to be settled, and evasions were distasteful to me.

However, everything has an end, everything passes away, even the hunger of people who have not eaten

Perfume is the soul of the flower, and sea-flowers have no soul.

With its untold depths, couldn't the sea keep alive such huge specimens of life from another age, this sea that never changes while the land masses undergo almost continuous alteration? Couldn't the heart of the ocean hide the last–remaining varieties of these titanic species, for whom years are centuries and centuries millennia?

I ask no more than to live a hundred years longer, that I may have more time to dwell the longer on your memory.

I am not what you call a civilised man! I have done with society entirely, for reasons which I alone have the right of appreciating. I do not, therefore, obey its laws, and I desire you never to allude to them before me again!

Captain Nemo pointed to this prodigious heap of shellfish, and I saw that these mines were genuinely inexhaustible, since nature's creative powers are greater than man's destructive instincts.

Conseil: If that is the case, this dugong may well be the last of its race, and perhaps it would be better to spare it, in the interest of science. Ned Land: Perhaps it will be better to hunt it, in the interest of the kitchen.

God, if he believed in Him, and his conscience, if he had one, were the only judges to whom he was answerable.

There is the disadvantage of not knowing all languages," said Conseil, "or the disadvantage of not having one universal language.

It was marvellous, a feast for the eyes, this complication of coloured tints, a perfect kaleidoscope of green, yellow, orange, violet, indigo, and blue; in one word, the whole palette of an enthusiastic colourist!

Sir," replied the commander, "I am nothing to you but Captain Nemo; and you and your companions are nothing to me but the passengers of the Nautilus.