Captain Nemo's Best Quotes, and the Translation They Reach You Through

Most quotation pages will hand you these lines with no indication of where they sit or whose English you are reading, which matters more for this novel than for almost any other nineteenth-century classic. The free text everybody quotes from, including the one behind the playable Twenty Thousand Leagues, is a Victorian version that a century of scholarship has spent correcting. Here are the lines, where they come from, and what that caveat actually amounts to.

💬 The three lines, and where they sit

They arrive within two chapters of each other, during the first extended conversation between the captain and his captive. Aronnax has been pulled out of the sea, fed, shown a library, and told he will never go home, and the novel uses that stretch to establish everything the reader is going to know about the man for the next six hundred pages.

• ✅“Mobilis in Mobili”— Part One, Chapter VIII, which takes the phrase as its own title. It is the ship’s motto, and the reader meets it as an engraving before anyone explains it.
• ✅“I am not what you call a civilised man” — Part One, Chapter X, said in answer to a direct accusation about how he treats the ships he sinks.
• ✅“The sea is everything”— Part One, Chapter X again, a few pages later, in answer to a question so mild it is almost small talk.

⚓ What the motto says, and where you find it

Not in a speech. Aronnax finds it stamped on the tableware at his first meal aboard, before he has met the man who owns it, and the narrator reproduces the mark in the middle of the page as a facsimile with a single initial under it.

“MOBILIS IN MOBILI. N.”

The Latin means moving within the moving element, or mobile within the mobile, depending on how literal you want to be. It is a claim about sovereignty rather than about engineering: the vessel is at home in the one medium no nation can fence, and the man who signs himself with one letter has arranged his life so that he answers to nothing fixed. English editions print it both as Mobili and as Mobile, which is its own small monument to the translation history below.

🌊 The sea speech, and the refusal beside it

The famous one comes out of nowhere. Aronnax asks whether the captain likes the sea, in the tone of a man making conversation over dinner, and gets a manifesto.

“Yes; I love it! 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.”

Two pages earlier the same conversation produces the harder line, and the two belong together. Aronnax has just said that sinking a crewed ship might be the right of a savage but not of a civilised man, which is about as direct as a guest can be to a host who controls the air supply.

“I am not what you call a civilised man! I have done with society entirely, for reasons which I alone have the right of appreciating.”

Notice the structure of that sentence, because the whole novel is built on it. He asserts a grievance, claims exclusive authority over its interpretation, and forbids further discussion in the same breath, and the book never overrules him. Whether that refusal reads as dignity or as evasion is an argument with its own evidence, which this post leaves to that one.

The Captive's Tour is a doorway in the playable Twenty Thousand Leagues: the captain is showing you a drawing-room full of things nobody ashore has seen, and you can ask him about the machine, about the library, or about why none of you is allowed to leave. Role-play Twenty Thousand Leagues →

📚 The translation behind all three lines

The English text carrying these quotations across the free internet is the Victorian one, prepared by Rev. Lewis Page Mercier with Eleanor Elizabeth King and published by Sampson Low in November 1872 according to the standard reference on the translator, which also records that his “shaky grasp of contemporary French idioms and limited knowledge of his era’s science and technology led him into many foolish translating errors.” Project Gutenberg publishes that text as ebook #164 without naming any translator at all, crediting only its own volunteers.

You do not have to take the criticism on trust, because the errors are still sitting in the file. The novelist and Verne specialist Steven R. Southard lists several specific ones, and each of the four below is reproduced verbatim in the free text this game and most websites use, at the line numbers given.

• ✅Steel that floats.The hull plates are described as having a density “from .7 to .8 that of water” (l.2867). Verne wrote 7.8 times the density of water, which is roughly correct for steel and the opposite of what the English says.
• ✅A cork jacket for a diving suit.Three men walk on the sea floor at a hundred metres wearing, in this English, “cork jackets” (l.5933, l.10615), a piece of kit that would make the walk impossible.
• ✅The disagreeable territory of Nebraska. Aronnax opens the book describing his field season there (l.333); the French calls the region the Badlands, which is a geological description rather than a slight.
• ✅A chapter heading that means nothing.Part Two, Chapter XX is titled “From Latitude 47° 24′ to Longitude 17° 28′” (l.86), which is not a route, because you cannot travel from a latitude to a longitude.

The cuts matter more than the howlers. The standard reference on the novel puts the loss at nearly a quarter of the French text, and Southard estimates a fifth to a quarter left untranslated, most of it the technical passages that explain how the vessel works. A reader who finds the book thin on engineering is often reading an English version with the engineering removed.

None of that makes the three quotations above unusable, and it does mean you should say which English you are quoting. The modern editions worth buying are the restored text prepared by Walter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter for the Naval Institute Press in 1993 and the annotated Oxford edition by William Butcher, and both sources consulted here agree on those two while disagreeing on enough else that this post declines to crown a single winner.