Jules Verne
20 books by Jules Verne to read free, each with its best passages and lines, and the best quotes from all of them below.
Where to start
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Around the World in Eighty Days
On a bet, an eccentric Victorian gentleman races to circumnavigate the globe.
63,360 words, about 4 hours
Then
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Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
107,180 words, about 8 hours
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Journey to the Center of the Earth
Prompted by a mysterious Icelandic manuscript, a professor and his nephew, with the aid of a local guide, adventure to the center of the earth through the crater of a dormant volcano.
73,452 words, about 5 hours
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The Mysterious Island
Five Americans, balloon-wrecked on a deserted island, must find a way to survive while revealing the island’s strange mysteries.
161,641 words, about 11 hours
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From the Earth to the Moon
After the end of the Civil War, the Baltimore Gun Club decides to apply its engineering expertise to the design of a cannon capable of shooting a projectile to the Moon.
51,138 words, about 4 hours
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Topsy-Turvy
The North Pole is auctioned off, and the winning team undertakes a scientific experiment to ameliorate the local climate.
42,485 words, about 3 hours
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An Antarctic Mystery
An American naturalist travels south beyond the remote Kerguelen Islands.
79,754 words, about 6 hours
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In Search of the Castaways
A Scottish lord and lady set off on a quest to find and rescue the shipwrecked Captain Grant.
134,972 words, about 9 hours
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The Adventures of Captain Hatteras
A mysterious captain assembles a ship and crew for a secret and dangerous voyage.
128,881 words, about 9 hours
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Dick Sands, the Boy Captain
A young sea apprentice finds himself in charge of a ship, which is led astray to a land where the slave trade abounds.
101,966 words, about 7 hours
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Facing the Flag
An engineer poses as an aide to a scientist whose invention of a world-conquering weapon drives him insane.
56,994 words, about 4 hours
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Michael Strogoff
A courier of the Russian Czar must race against time and the Siberian elements to deliver a crucial message of an impeding Tartar invasion and possible treachery.
99,677 words, about 7 hours
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Round the Moon
The giant rocket Columbiad travels to the Moon, engaging in discoveries and misadventures along the way.
55,800 words, about 4 hours
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The Child of the Cavern
An engineer returns to a depleted coal mine at an old friend’s request and investigates mysterious happenings.
44,214 words, about 3 hours
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The Fur Country
A group of colonists attempt to settle in the Arctic Circle.
124,971 words, about 9 hours
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The Giant Raft
A former slave trader with an encrypted note schemes about its meaning, while a man with a secret past travels with his family down the Amazon in a giant raft to attend his daughter’s wedding.
96,010 words, about 7 hours
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The Special Correspondent
A Parisian news reporter is assigned to travel across Asia by train and report on the sights, experiences, and interesting characters along the way.
72,378 words, about 5 hours
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The Survivors of the Chancellor
A record of the ill-fated voyage of the Chancellor as told by one of the passengers.
53,300 words, about 4 hours
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Ticket No. 9672
The wife of a lost fisherman finds his last message to her: a lottery ticket in a bottle.
49,588 words, about 3 hours
Jules Verne quotes
Phileas Fogg was a member of the Reform, and that was all.
Wit had conquered science.
He was a well of science, and the pulleys worked uneasily when you wanted to draw anything out of it. In a word, he was a learned miser.
It was the limitless ocean, limitless even to them from their commanding height.
Hence those gigantic cannons, much less useful than sewing-machines, but quite as astonishing, and much more admired.
But, in England, enthusiasm does not stop short with mere words. It strikes off money faster than the dies of the Royal Mint itself.
“In seeing an apple fall, Mrs. Scorbitt, a woman would have but the single idea—to eat it—for example, our mother Eve.”
No doubt the following narrative will be received with entire incredulity, but I think it well that the public should be put in possession of the facts narrated in “An Antarctic Mystery.”
Everything causes excitement at sea.
The Forward—forward to what? Without saying that nobody knows who her captain is.
Misquoted often as Virgil’s are the words
He lived but within himself, so to speak, a prey to a fixed idea which had brought him to the condition in which we find him.
“Sire, a fresh dispatch.”
Twenty-six minutes well employed are worth more than twenty-six years of doing nothing.
The exhausted mine was like the body of a huge fantastically-shaped mastodon, from which all the organs of life have been taken, and only the skeleton remains.
“He is come to see the moon.”
He read, he verified the sense of those lines, unintelligible to all but him, and then he smiled—and a most unpleasant smile it was.
Either one is a correspondent or one is not!
But it was fated to be otherwise.
There is quicksilver in the veins of their soil, but little or none in the veins of their bodies.
Reading paths
- Great adventures The stories every adventure since has borrowed from.
- Science fiction beginnings Robots, time travel, Martians and dystopia: every big idea, in its first book.
- The extraordinary voyages Verne's great journeys in his own French, by land, sea, air and space.