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

Scent is the soul of flowers, and sea flowers, as splendid as they may be, have no soul!

With its untold depths, couldn't the sea keep alive such huge specimens of life from another age, this sea that never changes while the land masses undergo almost continuous alteration? Couldn't the heart of the ocean hide the last–remaining varieties of these titanic species, for whom years are centuries and centuries millennia?

What I'd like to be above all is a writer.

I am nothing to you but Captain Nemo; and you and your companions are nothing to me but the passengers of the Nautilus.

In the memory of the dead all chronological differences are effaced.

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.