Great robbers always resemble honest folk. Fellows who have rascally faces have only one course to take, and that is to remain honest; otherwise, they would be arrested off-hand.

All that is impossible remains to be accomplished.

Science, my boy, is composed of errors, but errors that it is right to make, for they lead step by step to the truth.

A true Englishman doesn't joke when he is talking about so serious a thing as a wager.

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

The sea is the vast reservoir of Nature. The globe began with sea, so to speak; and who knows if it will not end with it?

Ah!" I cried, springing up. "But no! no! My uncle shall never know it. He would insist upon doing it too. He would want to know all about it. Ropes could not hold him, such a determined geologist as he is! He would start, he would, in spite of everything and everybody, and he would take me with him, and we should never get back. No, never! never!" My over-excitement was beyond all description.