Top 209 Quotes & Sayings by Jules Verne - Page 2

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

How many persons condemned to the horrors of solitary confinement have gone mad - simply because the thinking faculties have lain dormant!

To put up with what you cannot avoid is a philosophical principle, that may not perhaps lead you to the accomplishment of great deeds, but is assuredly eminently practical.

It must be that a man who shuts himself up between four walls must lose the faculty of associating ideas and words.

Numerous observations made upon fevers, somnambulisms, and other human maladies, seem to prove that the moon does exercise some mysterious influence upon man.

It is always a vulgar and often an unhealthy pastime, and it is a vice which does not go alone; the man who gambles will find himself capable of any evil.

One has only to follow events, and you will be all right. The surest way is to take whatever comes as it comes.

It is certain that the inanimate objects by which you are surrounded have a direct action on the brain.

Dost thou know what life is, my child? Hast thou comprehended the action of those springs which produce existence? Hast thou examined thyself?

You seize sentiment better when you get clear of nature. You breathe it in every sense!

Everybody knows that the great reversed triangle of land, with its base in the north and its apex in the south, which is called India, embraces fourteen hundred thousand square miles, upon which is spread unequally a population of one hundred and eighty millions of souls.

To modify the conditions of the Earth's movement is beyond the powers of man. It is not given to mankind to change the order established by the Creator in the system of the Universe.

Everybody knows that England is the world of betting men, who are of a higher class than mere gamblers: to bet is in the English temperament.

When you bring a man two millions of money, you need have but little fear that you will not be well received.

The Yankees, the first mechanicians in the world, are engineers - just as the Italians are musicians and the Germans metaphysicians - by right of birth. Nothing is more natural, therefore, than to perceive them applying their audacious ingenuity to the science of gunnery.

What is there unreasonable in admitting the intervention of a supernatural power in the most ordinary circumstances of life?

The regions of the North Pole situated within the eighty-fourth degree of north latitude have not yet been utilized, for the very good reason that they have not yet been discovered.

The wisest man may be a blind father.

I seriously believed that my last hour was approaching, and yet, so strange is imagination, all I thought of was some childish hypothesis or other. In such circumstances, you do not choose your own thoughts. They overcome you.

The Chinaman has only a passive courage, but this courage he possesses in the highest degree. His indifference to death is truly extraordinary. When he is ill, he sees it approach, and does not falter. When condemned, and already in the hands of an officer, he manifests no fear.

We were alone. Where, I could not say, hardly imagine. All was black, and such a dense black that, after some minutes, my eyes had not been able to discern even the faintest glimmer.

It may be taken for granted that, rash as Americans usually are, when they are prudent, there is good reason for it.

The human mind delights in grand conceptions of supernatural beings.

Wherever he saw a hole he always wanted to know the depth of it. To him this was important.

What darkness to you is light to me

With time and thought, one can do a good job.

Whatever one man is capable of imagining, other men will prove themselves capable of realizing.

All that is impossible remains to be accomplished.

The sole precoccupation of this learned society was the destruction of humanity for philanthropic reasons and the perfection of weapons as instruments of civilization.

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

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

Anything capable of being imagined will one day be made reality.

What you do for money you do badly.

It seems wisest to assume the worst from the beginning...and let anything better come as a surprise.

Solitude, isolation, are painful things, and beyond human endurance.

Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real.

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

Travel enables us to enrich our lives with new experiences, to enjoy and to be educated, to learn respect for foreign cultures, to establish friendships, and above all to contribute to international cooperation and peace throughout the world.

There are no impossible obstacles; there are just stronger and weaker wills, that’s all!

But to find, all at once, right before your eyes, that the impossible had been mysteriously achieved by man himself: this staggers the mind!

As long as the heart beats, as long as body and soul keep together, I cannot admit that any creature endowed with a will has need to despair of life.

I can undertake and persevere even without hope of success.

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

Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.

There is hope for the future, and when the world is ready for a new and better life, all these things will some day come to pass, - in God's good time

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

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.

You will travel in a Land of Marvels

He must have travelled everywhere, at least in the spirit.

How many things have been denied one day, only to become realities the next!

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

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.

Science, my lad, has been built upon many errors; but they are errors which it was good to fall into, for they led to the truth.

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

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

Anything you can imagine you can make real.

Look with all your eyes, look.

The chance which now seems lost may present itself at the last moment.