Life & Wisdom Quote by Jules Verne

Verne turns scientific failure into plot engine and moral stance at once: the “mistakes” aren’t embarrassments to be erased, they’re the fuel that makes discovery move. The line reads like a kindly rebuke to perfectionism, but the real sharpness is in its implied hierarchy of errors. Not all mistakes are equal; science, he suggests, has a sorting mechanism. It doesn’t magically avoid being wrong - it becomes valuable precisely by being wrong in ways that can be tested, revised, and chained to the next attempt.

The paternal address (“my lad”) matters. Verne isn’t writing as a lab technocrat; he’s writing as a 19th-century popularizer who believed modernity could be narrated. The tone is mentorship, almost adventure-story camaraderie: keep going, you’ll get there. That’s also the subtext of his fiction, where daring hypotheses and near-ridiculous contraptions are less about predicting the future than about dramatizing a method: curiosity, iteration, stubbornness.

Contextually, Verne is speaking from an era intoxicated with progress but haunted by its costs - industrialization, empire, new weapons. His optimism is conditional. “Little by little” is the quiet safeguard against grandiose certainty; it’s incrementalism as epistemology. And it lands now because it distinguishes science from the performance of certainty that politics and punditry often demand. Verne’s science is not a priesthood of correct answers, but a disciplined way of being wrong without getting stuck there.