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The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the terrestrial globe.
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“The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the terrestrial globe.”

Jules Verne

Source
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas
Date
1870
English wording
Lewis Page Mercier — Translator · from French
Meaning

Meaning of “The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of…”

Captain Nemo begins an expansive defense of ocean life by presenting the sea as the dominant physical environment of the planet and the realm in which he seeks freedom.

Source context

Where does it come from?

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, Part I, Chapter X, “The Man of the Seas,” represented by Project Gutenberg #164 in English translation. Captain Nemo tells Professor Aronnax that the sea is everything and covers seven-tenths of the globe inside a longer speech mixing geography, Romantic nature language and his desire for independence from terrestrial power. It is translated fictional dialogue, not a current scientific source.

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“In Wildness is the preservation of the World.”

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Meaning & context

Wild nature is presented not as useless space but as a preserving force for imagination, freedom, and human flourishing.

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It is eternity now.
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“It is eternity now.”

Richard Jefferies · The Story of My Heart · 1883
Meaning & context

Jefferies collapses ordinary chronological distinctions into an intensely experienced present, describing the current moment as participation in eternity rather than a point merely passing toward the future.

Source details

The Story of My Heart (1883), Chapter III, Project Gutenberg #2317. The inherited Chapter I note is corrected: ‘It is eternity now’ occurs in Jefferies’s tumulus meditation after he writes that, recognising his inner consciousness / psyche, he cannot understand time. It is speculative spiritual autobiography and metaphysical-poetic reflection, not a scientific theory of time, physics or consciousness.

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A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.
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“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.”

John Keats · Endymion · 1818
Meaning & context

Keats opens the poem by claiming that beauty can continue to give delight beyond the instant in which it is first encountered.

Source details

Endymion: A Poetic Romance (1818), Book I, line 1, Project Gutenberg #24280, reproducing the Taylor and Hessey 1818 text. “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever” opens the poem’s mythic Romantic meditation on beauty; the statement remains a poetic proposition rather than empirical evidence that every aesthetic experience produces permanent happiness.

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Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.
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“Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson · Nature · 1836
Meaning & context

The same surroundings can feel different according to the observer’s inner state, linking perception of nature with emotion and perspective.

Source details

Nature (first published 1836), Chapter I, “Nature,” in James Munroe and Company’s 1849 new-edition witness represented by Project Gutenberg #29433. A scan of the same 1849 J. Munroe edition places “Nature always wears the colors of the spirit” on printed page 9. Emerson is arguing that inward condition colors the experience of landscape; this is nineteenth-century Transcendentalist philosophy, not modern cognitive science, environmental psychology or a clinical claim.

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I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.
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“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.”

Walt Whitman · Song of Myself · 1855
Meaning & context

Death becomes continuity with nature rather than simple disappearance, connecting mortality with renewal, earth, and the lives that follow.

Source details

Leaves of Grass (1855), untitled first-edition poem later known as “Song of Myself,” printed page 56 (Wikisource scan page 62). The line belongs to the poem’s final movement, later numbered section 52; the 1855 record remains tied to the unnumbered first edition rather than inheriting later section structure.

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The greatness and the minuteness of nature pass all understanding.
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“The greatness and the minuteness of nature pass all understanding.”

John Burroughs · Wake-Robin · 1871
Meaning & context

Burroughs emphasizes that nature can astonish at both immense and tiny scales, leaving observation capable of deepening wonder rather than exhausting it.

Source details

Wake-Robin; Burroughs reflects on close observation of natural life and the limits of easy comprehension.