An energetic man will succeed where an indolent one would vegetate and inevitably perish.

[we see that] science is eminently perfectible, and that each theory has constantly to give way to a fresh one.

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

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

One's native land!?there should one live! there die!

Captain Nemo pointed to this prodigious heap of shellfish, and I saw that these mines were genuinely inexhaustible, since nature's creative powers are greater than man's destructive instincts.

It seems wisest to assume the worst from the beginning...and let anything better come as a surprise.