Jules Verne Quotes

Science, my boy, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.

~ Jules Verne

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

~ Jules Verne

While there is life, there is hope.

~ Jules Verne

So, fatality will play me these terrible tricks. The elements themselves conspire to overwhelm me with mortification. Air, fire, and water combine their united efforts to oppose my passage. Well, they shall see what the earnest will of a determined man can do. I will not yield, I will not retreat even one inch; and we shall see who shall triumph in this great contest - man or nature.

~ Jules Verne

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

~ Jules Verne

Still, for long the love of science triumphed over all other feelings. He became an artist deeply impressed by the marvels of art, a philosopher to whom no one of the higher sciences was unknown, a statesman versed in the policy of European courts. To the eyes of those who observed him superficially he might have passed for one of those cosmopolitans, curious of knowledge, but disdaining action; one of those opulent travelers, haughty and cynical, who move incessantly from place to place, and are of no country.

~ Jules Verne

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.

~ Jules Verne

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

~ Jules Verne

But in the cause of science men are expected to suffer.

~ Jules Verne

I gazed at these marvels in profound silence. Words were utterly wanting to indicate the sensations of wonder I experienced. I seemed, as I stood upon that mysterious shore, as if I were some wandering inhabitant of a distant planet, present for the first time at the spectacle of some terrestrial phenomena belonging to another existence. To give body and existence to such new sensations would have required the coinage of new words - and here my feeble brain found itself wholly at fault. I looked on, I thought, I reflected, I admired, in a state of stupefaction not altogether unmingled with fear!

~ Jules Verne

Science, great, mighty and in the end unerring, science has fallen into many errors - errors which have been fortunate and useful rather than otherwise, for they have been the steppingstones to truth.

~ Jules Verne

We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.

~ Jules Verne

In the meantime, there is not an hour to lose. I am about to visit the public library.

~ Jules Verne

Phileas Fogg, having shut the door of his house at half-past eleven, and having put his right foot before his left five hundred and seventy-five times, and his left foot before his right five hundred and seventy-six times, reached the Reform Club

~ Jules Verne

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.

~ Jules Verne

There is no more sagacious animal than the Icelandic horse. He is stopped by neither snow, nor storm, nor impassable roads, nor rocks, glaciers, or anything. He is courageous, sober, and surefooted. He never makes a false step, never shies. If there is a river or fjord to cross (and we shall meet with many) you will see him plunge in at once, just as if he were amphibious, and gain the opposite bank.

~ Jules Verne

In the course of time, Michael Strogoff reached a high station in the Empire. But it is not the history of his success, but the history of his trials, which deserves to be related.

~ Jules Verne

It is only when you suffer that you truly understand.

~ Jules Verne

But what then? What had he really gained by all this trouble? What had he brought back from this long and weary journey? Nothing, say you? Perhaps so;...Truly, would you not for less than that go around the world?

~ Jules Verne

I looked on, I thought, I reflected, I admired, in a state of stupefaction not altogether unmingled with fear!

~ Jules Verne

...why, I've just this instant found out... that we might have gone around the world in only seventy-eight days.

~ Jules Verne

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

~ Jules Verne

Death, the beginning of eternal things, is only the end of earthly cares. -Priest

~ Jules Verne

When I returned to partial life my face was wet with tears. How long that state of insensibility had lasted I cannot say. I had no means now of taking account of time. Never was solitude equal to this, never had any living being been so utterly forsaken.

~ Jules Verne

Though sleep is called our best friend, it is a friend who often keeps us waiting!

~ Jules Verne

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

~ Jules Verne

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

~ Jules Verne

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

~ Jules Verne

One of my objectives is learning more than is absolutely necessary.

~ Jules Verne

I wanted to protect my professorial dignity and not lay myself open to laughter from the Americans, who when they do laugh, laugh raucously

~ Jules Verne

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

~ Jules Verne

Your story is not a picture of life; it lacks the elements of truth. And why? Simply because you run straight on to the end; because you do not analyze. Your heroes do this thing or that from this or that motive, which you assign without ever a thought of dissecting their mental and moral natures. Our feelings, you must remember, are far more complex than all that. In real life every act is theresultant of a hundred thoughts that come and go, and theseyou must study, each by itself, if you would create a livingcharacter. 'But,' you will say, 'in order to note these fleetingthoughts one must know them, must be able to follow them in their capricious meanderings.You have simply to make use of hypnotism, electrical or human, which gives one a two-fold being, setting free the witness-personality so that it may see, understand, and remember the reasons which determine the personality that acts.

~ Jules Verne

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

~ Jules Verne

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.

~ Jules Verne

A minimum put to good use is enough for anything.

~ Jules Verne

In spite of the opinions of certain narrow-minded people, who would shut up the human race upon this globe, as within some magic circle it must never outstep, we shall one day travel to the moon, the planets, and the stars, with the same facility, rapidity, and certainty as we now make the voyage from Liverpool to New York!

~ Jules Verne

Put two ships in the open sea, without wind or tide, and, at last, they will come together. Throw two planets into space, and they will fall one on the other. Place two enemies in the midst of a crowd, and they will inevitably meet; it is a fatality, a question of time; that is all.

~ Jules Verne

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.

~ Jules Verne

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.

~ Jules Verne

Everything great in science and art is simple. What can be less complicated than the greatest discoveries of humanity - gravitation, the compass, the printing press, the steam engine, the electric telegraph?

~ Jules Verne