Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Quotes

And that it did exist was undeniable. There was no longer any disposition to class it in the list of fabulous creatures. The human mind is ever hungry to believe in new and marvellous phenomena, and so it is easy for us to understand the vast excitement produced throughout the whole world by this supernatural apparition.

Thus may we explain this inexplicable animal, unless there exists in reality nothing at all, despite what has already been conjectured, seen, perceived, and experienced. Which condition is, of course, just within the bounds of possibility.

“By the pluck!” he fumed. “Here are people as badly off as the Scotch for hospitality. They are gentle as cannibals. And I shouldn’t be surprised if they were man-eaters. But I’ll be right there when they start to swallow me.”

A flash of anger and contempt kindled in the eyes of the Unknown, and I had a fleeting vision of some terrible past in the life of this man. Not only had he put himself beyond the pale of human laws, but he had made himself independent of them. In the strictest sense of the word, he was free, because he was outside the reach of the moral code.

“Yes, sir, I love it! The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and life-giving. It is an immense desert place where man is never lonely, for he sense the weaving of Creation on every hand. It is the physical embodiment of a supernatural existence.”

Monstrous brutes that could crush a whole man with one snap of their iron jaws! I do not know if Conseil, with true scientific ardour, stopped to classify them. But, for my part, I could not but note their silver bellies, their huge maws bristling with teeth, and thought of these from a most unscientific point of view. I regarded myself more as a possible victim than as a naturalist.

“Why are you so astonished, M. Arronax, at meeting savages when you set foot on a strange land? Where in all the earth are there not savages? And do you for a moment suppose them worse than other men, these fellows that you call savages?”

We were growing fast to our shell like snails, and I swear it must be easy to lead a snail’s existence. Thus, our undersea life began to seem natural to us, and we no longer thought of the days we used to spend on land.

“That Indian, my dear sir, is a member of an oppressed race. And I still am and ever shall be one with all such people.”

“Freedom may come high, but it’s worth paying for […] Who knows but that tomorrow we may be a hundred leagues away? Let chance but favor us, sir, and by ten or eleven o’clock we shall have landed on terra firma, dead or alive.”

It was an unforgettably sad day that I then passed, torn between the desire of regaining my freedom and my dislike of abandoning the marvelous ship and thus leaving my undersea studies incomplete.

I had long guessed that, whatever motive had led him to seek freedom at the bottom of the ocean, it had not been an ignoble one. I had seen that his heart still beat for the sorrows of humanity, and sensed that his immense charity was for oppressed races as well as individuals.

“What a beautiful situation to be in!” I chortled. “To overrun regions where man has never trod, depths to which even dead or inanimate matter may never more descend! Look, Captain, at these magnificent rocks, these uninhabitable grottoes. Here are the lowest known receptacles of the globe, where life is not only impossible unthinkable. What unknown sights are here? Why should we be unable to find and preserve some visible evidence of our journey as a souvenir?”

“I, Captain Nemo, on this 21st day of March, 1868, have reached the South Pole on the 90th degree. And I hereby take possession of this portion of the globe, equal in extent to one-sixth of the continents now known to man.”

“In whose name, sir?” I asked.

“In my own, M. Arronax.”

Around the “Nautilus,” above and below it, was an impenetrable wall of ice. We were prisoners to the Great Ice Barrier.