Jules Verne

“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.”

“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.”

“Liberty is worth paying for.”

“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.”

“'Movement is life;' and it is well to be able to forget the past, and kill the present by continual change.”

“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.”

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

“The possession of wealth leads almost inevitably to its abuse. It is the chief, if not the only, cause of evils which desolate this world below. The thirst for gold is responsible for the most regrettable lapses into sin.”

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

“On the morrow the horizon was covered with clouds- a thick and impenetrable curtain between earth and sky, which unhappily extended as far as the Rocky Mountains. It was a fatality!”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“In presence of Nature's grand convulsions, man is powerless.”