Quotes from book
A Journey to the Center of the Earth

Name: A Journey to the Center of the Earth
Author: Jules Verne

Jules VerneOriginal title Voyage au centre de la Terre (French, 1864)

Journey to the Center of the Earth is an 1864 science fiction novel by Jules Verne. The story involves German professor Otto Lidenbrock who believes there are volcanic tubes going toward the centre of the Earth. He, his nephew Axel, and their guide Hans descend into the Icelandic volcano Snæfellsjökull, encountering many adventures, including prehistoric animals and natural hazards, before eventually coming to the surface again in southern Italy, at the Stromboli volcano.

“The Great Architect of the universe built it of good stuff.”

Jules Verne book A Journey to the Center of the Earth

Source: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Ch. XXXI in the French text, Tr. William Butcher (1992)

“External objects produce decided effects upon the brain. A man shut up between four walls soon loses the power to associate words and ideas together. How many prisoners in solitary confinement become idiots, if not mad, for want of exercise for the thinking faculty!”

Jules Verne book A Journey to the Center of the Earth

Les objets extérieurs ont une action réelle sur le cerveau. Qui s’enferme entre quatre murs finit par perdre la faculté d’associer les idées et les mots. Que de prisonniers cellulaires devenus imbéciles, sinon fous, par le défaut d’exercice des facultés pensantes.
Source: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Ch. XXVI: The worst peril of all

“But Heaven never sends unmixed grief, and for Professor Liedenbrock there was a satisfaction in store proportioned to his desperate anxieties.”

Jules Verne book A Journey to the Center of the Earth

Mais aux grandes douleurs le ciel mêle incessamment les grandes joies, et il réservait au professeur Lidenbrock une satisfaction égale à ses désespérants ennuis.
Source: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Ch. XVI: Boldly down the crater

“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.”

Jules Verne book A Journey to the Center of the Earth

La science, mon garçon, est faite d’erreurs, mais d’erreurs qu’il est bon de commettre, car elles mènent peu à peu à la vérité.
Source: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Ch. XXXI: Preparations for a voyage of discovery

“The undulation of these infinite numbers of mountains, whose snowy summits make them look as if covered by foam, recalled to my remembrance the surface of a storm-beaten ocean. If I looked towards the west, the ocean lay before me in all its majestic grandeur, a continuation as it were, of these fleecy hilltops. Where the earth ended and the sea began it was impossible for the eye to distinguish.

I soon felt that strange and mysterious sensation which is awakened in the mind when looking down from lofty hilltops, and now I was able to do so without any feeling of nervousness, having fortunately hardened myself to that kind of sublime contemplation. I wholly forgot who I was, and where I was. I became intoxicated with a sense of lofty sublimity, without thought of the abysses into which my daring was soon about to plunge me.”

Jules Verne book A Journey to the Center of the Earth

<p>Les ondulations de ces montagnes infinies, que leurs couches de neige semblaient rendre écumantes, rappelaient à mon souvenir la surface d'une mer agitée. Si je me retournais vers l'ouest, l'Océan s'y développait dans sa majestueuse étendue, comme une continuation de ces sommets moutonneux. Où finissait la terre, où commençaient les flots, mon oeil le distinguait à peine.</p><p>Je me plongeais ainsi dans cette prestigieuse extase que donnent les hautes cimes, et cette fois, sans vertige, car je m'accoutumais enfin à ces sublimes contemplations. Mes regards éblouis se baignaient dans la transparente irradiation des rayons solaires, j'oubliais qui j'étais, où j'étais, pour vivre de la vie des elfes ou des sylphes, imaginaires habitants de la mythologie scandinave; je m'enivrais de la volupté des hauteurs, sans songer aux abîmes dans lesquels ma destinée allait me plonger avant peu.</p>
Source: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Ch. XVI: Boldly down the crater

“Man is so constituted that health is a purely negative state. Hunger once satisfied, it is difficult for a man to imagine the horrors of starvation; they cannot be understood without being felt.”

Jules Verne book A Journey to the Center of the Earth

L’homme est ainsi fait, que sa santé est un effet purement négatif; une fois le besoin de manger satisfait, on se figure difficilement les horreurs de la faim; il faut les éprouver, pour les comprendre.
Source: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Ch. XLII: Headlong speed upward through the horrors of darkness

“While his heart still beats, while his flesh still moves, I cannot accept that a being endowed with will-power can give in to despair.”

Jules Verne book A Journey to the Center of the Earth

Et tant que son coeur bat, tant que sa chair palpite, je n'admets pas qu'un être doué de volonté laisse en lui place au désespoir.
Source: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Ch. XLII in the French text, Tr. William Butcher (1992)

“Hunger, prolonged, is temporary madness! The brain is at work without its required food, and the most fantastic notions fill the mind. Hitherto I had never known what hunger really meant. I was likely to understand it now.”

Jules Verne book A Journey to the Center of the Earth

These sentences, from an early translation of the book (Griffith and Farran, 1871), have no source in the original French text.
Source: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Ch. XLI: The great explosion and the rush down below

“To describe my despair would be impossible. No words could tell it. I was buried alive, with the prospect before me of dying of hunger and thirst.”

Jules Verne book A Journey to the Center of the Earth

Je ne puis peindre mon désespoir; nul mot de la langue humaine ne rendrait mes sentiments. J’étais enterré vif, avec la perspective de mourir dans les tortures de la faim et de la soif.
Source: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Ch. XXVII: Lost in the bowels of the earth