Quotes by Jules Verne

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

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

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

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

I believe cats to be spirits come to earth. A cat, I am sure, could walk on a cloud without coming through.

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.

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

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.

A minimum put to good use is enough for anything.

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!

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.

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 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.

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?

It is for others one must learn to do everything for there lies the secret of happiness.

With happiness as with health: to enjoy it, one should be deprived of it occasionally.

Nothing is more dreadful than private duels in America. The two adversaries attack each other like wild beasts. Then it is that they might well covet those wonderful properties of the Indians of the prairies - their quick intelligence, their ingenious cunning, their scent of the enemy.

The industrial stomach cannot live without coal industry is a carbonivorous animal and must have its proper food.

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

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.