Yes, I could see these enormous elephants, whose trunks were tearing down large boughs, and working in and out the trees like a legion of serpents. I could hear the sounds of the mighty tusks uprooting huge trees!

The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides.

Science, my lad, has been built upon many errors; but they are errors which it was good to fall into, for they led to the truth.

Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.

So is man's heart. The desire to perform a work which will endure, which will survive him, is the origin of his superiority over all other living creatures here below. It is this which has established his dominion, and this it is which justifies it, over all the world.

Poets are like proverbs: you can always find one to contradict another.

It is not new continents the earth needs, but new men.