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20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and other Classic Novels QUOTES

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and other Classic Novels QUOTES

1 " You love the sea, don’t you, Captain?”“Yes, I love it! The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert where a man is never alone, for he can feel life quivering all about him. The sea is only a receptacle for all the prodigious, supernatural things that exist inside it; it is only movement and love; it is the living infinite, as one of your poets has said. And in fact, Professor, it contains the three kingdoms of nature—mineral, vegetable and animal. This last is well represented by the four groups of zoophytes, by the three classes of articulata, by the five classes of mollusks, by three classes of vertebrates, mammals and reptiles, and those innumerable legions of fish, that infinite order of animals which includes more than thirteen thousand species, only one-tenth of which live in fresh water. The sea is a vast reservoir of nature. The world, so to speak, began with the sea, and who knows but that it will also end in the sea! There lies supreme tranquillity. The sea does not belong to tyrants. On its surface, they can still exercise their iniquitous rights, fighting, destroying one another and indulging in their other earthly horrors. But thirty feet below its surface their power ceases, their influence dies out and their domination disappears! Ah, Monsieur, one must live—live within the ocean! Only there can one be independent! Only there do I have no master! There I am free! "

― Jules Verne , 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and other Classic Novels

2 " While I was dreaming about all this and trying to fix in my memory all the details of this grandiose landscape, Captain Nemo was leaning on a mossy slab of stone without moving, and as if petrified in mute ecstasy. Was he thinking of those generations long since dead and asking them the secret of human destiny? Was it here that this strange man came to steep himself in history and relive the life of ancient times, he who would have nothing to do with the world around him? How much I would have given to know his thoughts, to share and understand them! "

― Jules Verne , 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and other Classic Novels