Re: [PSUBS-MAILIST] What is your favorite quotation?

Yes, I love it. The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert where a man is never alone, for he can feel life quivering all about him. The sea is only a receptacle for all the prodigious, supernatural things that exist inside it; it is only movement and love; it is the living infinite, as one of your poets has said. And in fact, Professor, it contains the three kingdoms of nature- mineral, animal and vegetable. This last is well represented by the four groups of zoophytes, by the three classes of articulata, by the five classes of molluskes, by the three classes of vertebrates, mammals and reptiles, and by those innumerable legions of fish, that infinite order of animals which includes more that thirteen thousand species, only one tenth of which live in fresh water. The sea is a vast reservoir of nature. The world, so to speak, began with the sea, and who knows that is will also end with the sea! There lies supreme tranquility. The sea does not belong to tyrants. On the surface, they can still exercise their iniquitous rights, fighting, destroying one another and indulging in their other earthly horrors. But thirty feet below its surface their power ceases, their influence dies out and their domination disappears! Ah, Monsieur, one must live- live within the ocean! Only there can one be independent! Only there do I have no master! There I am free!