“Are we rising again?" "No. On the contrary." "Are we descending?" "Worse than that, captain! we are falling!" "For Heaven's sake heave out the ballast!" "There! the last sack is empty!" "Does the balloon rise?" "No!" "I hear a noise like the dashing of waves. The sea is below the car! It cannot be more than 500 feet from us!" "Overboard with every weight! … everything!”

“We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones.”

“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.”

“Is the Master out of his mind?' she asked me.I nodded.'And he's taking you with him?'I nodded again.'Where?' she asked.I pointed towards the centre of the earth.'Into the cellar?' exclaimed the old servant.'No,' I said, 'farther down than that.”

“We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.”

“Your dead sleep quietly, at least, Captain, out of reach of sharks" "Yes, sir, of sharks and men.”

“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?”