Jules Verne is 184 Today, Here are 15 Reasons Why He’s Still Cooler Than You’ll Ever Be

Zut alors! Just when I was starting to feel good about my career trajectory, Jules Verne has to go and have a birthday, reminding me that it’s basically impossible to ever be as rad as he was. And it’s not just because he wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days, and Journey to the Center of the Earth. Come, bask in the Father of Science Fiction’s glory:

Five Bad-Ass Things You Didn’t Know About Jules Verne:

1) He’s the second-most translated writer in history — he beats out Plato, William Shakespeare, Karl Marx, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway, and literally every other writer you can think of. (Except Agatha Christie, who somehow holds the top spot.)

2) He got his start writing opera librettos.

3) Dude wrote 65 novels, 38 scripts, 30 short stories, and 123 poems. In fact, he wrote at least one book every year for over 40 years.

4) In 1884 Pope Leo XIII blessed his books and gave him personal congratulations for his work.

5) On top of all that, at age 60, he was elected as town councilor of his hometown and served for 15 years.

Five Real Jules Verne Book Titles:

1) The Sphinx of the Ice Fields

2) The Purchase of the North Pole

3) Propeller Island

4) The Lighthouse at the End of the World

5) The Chase of the Golden Meteor

Five Awesome Jules Verne Quotations:

1) “Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real.”

2) “Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.”

3) “I believe cats to be spirits come to earth. A cat, I am sure, could walk on a cloud without coming through.”

4) “The human mind delights in grand conceptions of supernatural beings. And the sea is precisely their best vehicle, the only medium through which these giants (against which terrestrial animals, such as elephants or rhinoceroses, are as nothing) can be produced or developed.”

5) “How much further can we go? What are the final frontiers in this quest for travel? Will humankind only be satisfied when journeys into space become readily available and affordable?”

Joyeux anniversaire, you magnificent bastard!