Herbert George Wells (1866-1946)
H. G. Wells was an English writer. Prolific in many genres, he wrote dozens of novels, short stories, and works of social commentary, history, satire, biography and autobiography. (H.G. Wells Quotes)
“A darkness, a flood of darkness that opened and spread and blotted out all things.”
H.G. Wells
A Dream of Armageddon
“A few minutes before, there had only been three real things before me–the immensity of the night and space and nature, my own feebleness and anguish, and the near approach of death.”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“A large number of houses deserve to be burnt, most modern furniture, an overwhelming majority of pictures and books – one might go on for some time with the list. If our community was collectively anything more than a feeble idiot, it would burn most of London and Chicago, for example, an build sane and beautiful cities in the place of these pestilential heaps of private property.”
H.G. Wells
The History of Mr. Polly
“A strange persuasion came upon me that, save for the grossness of the line, save for the grotesqueness of the forms, I had here before me the whole balance of human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and fate in its simplest form.”
H.G. Wells
The Island of Dr. Moreau
“A weakly willful being struggling to get obdurate things round impossible corners—in that symbol Mr. Polly could recognise himself and all the trouble of humanity.”
H.G. Wells
The History of Mr. Polly
“After all it was true that a girl does not go alone in the world unchallenged, nor ever has gone freely alone in the world, that evil walks abroad and dangers, and petty insults more irritating than dangers, lurk.”
H.G. Wells
Ann Veronica
“After telephone, kinematograph and phonograph had replaced newspaper, book schoolmaster and letter, to live outside the range of the electric cables was to live an isolated savage.”
H.G. Wells
When the Sleeper Wakes
“All men, however highly educated, retain some superstitious inklings.”
H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man
“All passion is madness.”
H.G. Wells
In the Days of the Comet
“Alone it is wonderful how little a man can do alone! To rob a little, to hurt a little, and there is the end.”
H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man
“Already he knew something of the history of the intervening years. He had heard now of the moral decay that had followed the collapse of supernatural religion in the minds of ignoble man, the decline of public honor, the ascendency of wealth. For men who had lost their belief in God had still kept their faith in property, and wealth ruled a venial world.”
H.G. Wells
When the Sleeper Wakes
“An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.”
H.G. Wells
The Island of Dr. Moreau
“An invisible foot trod on his back, a ghostly patter passed downstairs, he heard the two police officers in the hall shout and run, and the front door of the house slammed violently.”
H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man
“And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers – shriveled now, and brown and flat and brittle – to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of men.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“And I tell you, pleasure and pain have nothing to do with heaven and hell.”
H.G. Wells
The Island of Dr. Moreau
“And in friendship and still more here, in this central business of love, accident rules it seems to me almost altogether. What personalities you will encounter in life, and have for a chief interest in life, is nearly as much a matter of chance as the drift of a grain of pollen in the pine forest. And once the light hazard has blown it has blown, never to drive again.”
H.G. Wells
The Passionate Friends
“And that the state cannot implement its actions and policies in a satisfactory manner, and education will not achieve the desired results with the presence of a group of wealthy, irresponsible people.. as they, by their nature, have criticized, corrupted and undermined every project undertaken by the government. Their ostentation and arrogance distorted and distorted all the values of life.” (H.G. Wells Quotes)
H.G. Wells
Men Like Gods
“And the great difference between man and monkey is in the larynx, he said, in the incapacity to frame delicately different sounding symbols by which thought could be sustained”
H.G. Wells
The Island of Dr. Moreau
“And the great difference between man and monkey is in the larynx.”
H.G. Wells
The Island of Dr. Moreau
“And with that the Time Traveller began his story as I have set it forth. He sat back in his chair at first, and spoke like a weary man. Afterwards he got more animated.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“And you cannot move at all in Time, you cannot get away from the present moment.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“As if there wasn’t a thousand things that were never heard.”
H.G. Wells
When the Sleeper Wakes
“As night goes round the Earth always there are hundreds of thousands of people who should be sleeping, lying awake, fearing a bully, fearing a cruel competition, dreading lest they cannot make good, ill of some illness they cannot comprehend, distressed by some irrational quarrel, maddened by some thwarted instinct or some suppressed perverted desire.”
H.G. Wells
Men Like Gods
“At the time there was a strong feeling in the streets that the authorities were to blame for their incapacity to dispose of the invaders without all this inconvenience.”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“At times I suffered from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me. I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all. This feeling was very strong upon me that night.”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“Because of it, food has become expensive for some people, and impossible for others.. Thus, man’s wealth has increased tremendously.. In our world, a person’s wealth increases when he controls the services provided to people instead of providing and facilitating them.”
H.G. Wells
Men Like Gods
“But by that time Lady Harman had acquired the habit of reading and the habit of thinking over what she read, and from that it is an easy step to thinking over oneself and the circumstances of one’s own life. The one thing trains for the other.”
H.G. Wells
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman
“But in truth, a general prohibition in a state may increase the sum of liberty, and a general permission may diminish it. It does not follow, as these people would have us believe, that a man is more free where there is least law and more restricted where there is most law.”
H.G. Wells
A Modern Utopia
“But it is the universal weakness of mankind that what we are given to administer we presently imagine we own.”
H.G. Wells
The Outline of History
“But there are times when the little cloud spreads, until it obscures the sky. And those times I look around at my fellow men and I am reminded of some likeness of the beast-people, and I feel as though the animal is surging up in them. And I know they are neither wholly animal nor holy man, but an unstable combination of both.”
H.G. Wells
The Island of Dr. Moreau
“By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“Down the mountain we shall go and down the passes, and as the valleys open the world will open, Utopia, where men and women are happy and laws are wise, and where all that is tangled and confused in human affairs has been unravelled and made right.”
H.G. Wells
A Modern Utopia
“Education is the release of man from self.”
H.G. Wells
The World Set Free
“Even now, does not an East-end worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth?”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“Even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“Every conceivable sort of silly creature that has ever been created has been sent to cross me.”
H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man
“Every economic dissertation and discussion reminds one more strongly than the last of the game of croquet Alice played in Wonderland”
H.G. Wells
A Modern Utopia
“Every soul aboard stood at the bulwarks or on the seats of the steamer and stared at that distant shape, higher than the trees or church towers inland, and advancing with a leisurely parody of a human stride.”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“Everyone seemed eager to talk at once, and the result was Babel.”
H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man
“Face this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“Fact takes no heed of human hopes.”
H.G. Wells
When the Sleeper Wakes
“Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims.”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart.” (H.G. Wells Quotes)
H.G. Wells
The History of Mr. Polly
“For a time I believed that mankind had been swept out of existence, and that I stood there alone, the last man left alive.”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“For fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shopkeeper in Fishbourne. Years they were in which every day was tedious, and when they were gone it was as if they had gone in a flash.”
H.G. Wells
The History of Mr. Polly
“For the man who stood there shouting some incoherent explanation, was a solid gesticulating figure up to the coat-collar of him, and then — nothingness, no visible thing at all!”
H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man
“For the most part people went about their business with an entirely irresponsible confidence in the stability of the universe.”
H.G. Wells
The New Machiavelli
“Great and strange ideas transcending experience often have less effect upon men and women than smaller, more tangible considerations.”
H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man
“Great land of sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asylum, refreshment and refuge from the world of everyday!”
H.G. Wells
The History of Mr. Polly
“He blinked at the sun and dreamt that perhaps he might snare it and spare it as it went down to its resting place amidst the distant hills.”
H.G. Wells
The World Set Free
“He buried his nose in his pillow and went to sleep—to dream of anything rather than getting on in the world, as a sensible young man in his position ought to have done.”
H.G. Wells
The History of Mr. Polly
“He extended his hand: It seemed to meet something in mid-air, and he drew it back with a sharp exclamation.”I wish you’d keep your fingers out of my eye,” said the aerial voice, in a tone of savage expostulation.”
H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man
“He seemed under a chronic irritation of the greatest intensity. His habit of talking to himself in a low voice grew steadily upon him, but though Mrs. Hall listened conscientiously she could make neither head nor tail of what she heard.”
H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man
“He showed it to me with all the confiding zest of a man who has been living too much alone. This seclusion was overflowing now in an excess of confidence, and I had the good luck to be the recipient.”
H.G. Wells
“He suffered from indigestion now nearly every afternoon in his life, but as he lacked introspection he projected the associated discomfort upon the world. Every afternoon he discovered afresh that life as a whole and every aspect of life that presented itself was “beastly.”
H.G. Wells
The History of Mr. Polly
“He walked with just such a limp as I have seen in footsore tramps.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“Here was the same beautiful scene, the same abundant foliage, the same splendid palaces and magnificent ruins, the same silver river running between its fertile banks.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“His was darkness unbroken by a ray of thought or sensation, a dreamless inanition, a vast space of peace.”
H.G. Wells
When the Sleeper Wakes
“Humanity had been strong, energetic, and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now came the reaction of the altered conditions.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“I am a lone wolf, a solitary man, wandering through a world in which I have no part.”
H.G. Wells
When the Sleeper Wakes
“I can best express my state of mind by saying that I wanted to be in at the death.”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“I did not feel then that I was lonely, that I had come out from the world into a desolate place. I appreciated my loss of sympathy, but I put it down to the general inanity of things.”
H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man
“I did not know it, but that was the last civilised dinner I was to eat for very many strange and terrible days.”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“I don’t suppose any man has ever understood any woman since the beginning of things. You don’t understand our imaginations, how wild our imaginations can be.”
H.G. Wells
The Shape of Things to Come
“I feel to think, he thinks to feel. It is I and my kind that have the wider range, because we can be impersonal as well as personal. We can escape ourselves.”
H.G. Wells
The First Men in the Moon
“I fell indeed into a morbid state, deep and enduring, and alien to fear, which has left permanent scars upon my mind. I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world when I saw it suffering the painful disorder of this island.”
H.G. Wells
The Island of Dr. Moreau
“I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“I had made myself the most complicated and the most hopeless trap that ever a man devised.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world”
H.G. Wells
The Island of Dr. Moreau
“I never blame anyone,” said Kemp. “It’s quite out of fashion.”
H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man
“I perceived with a sudden novel vividness the extraordinary folly of everything I had ever done.”
H.G. Wells
The First Men in the Moon
“I saw huge buildings rise up faint and fair, and pass like dreams.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“I say I became habituated to the Beast People, that a thousand things which had seemed unnatural and repulsive speedily became natural an ordinary to me. I suppose everything in existence takes its colour from the average hue of our surroundings.” (H.G. Wells Quotes)
H.G. Wells
The Island of Dr. Moreau
“I suppose everything in existence takes its colour from the average hue of our surroundings.”
H.G. Wells
The Island of Dr. Moreau
“I suppose it is a lingering trace of Plutarch and my ineradicable boyish imagination that at bottom our State should be wise, sane, and dignified, that makes me think a country which leaves its medical and literary criticism, or indeed any such vitally important criticism, entirely to private enterprise and open to the advances of any purchaser much be in a frankly hopeless condition.”
H.G. Wells
Tono-Bungay
“I thought I was killing myself and I did not care.”
H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man
“I was invisible, and I was only just beginning to realise the extraordinary advantage my invisibility gave me. My head was already teeming with plans of all the wild and wonderful things I had now impunity to do.”
H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man
“I went over the heads of the things a man reckons desirable. No doubt invisibility made it possible to get them, but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they are got.”
H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man
“I went to a box room at the top of the house and locked myself in, in order to be alone with my aching miseries.”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“If ever that door offers itself to me again, I swore, I will go in out of this dust and heat, out of this dry glitter of vanity, out of these toilsome futilities. I will go and never return.”
H.G. Wells
Short Stories by H.G. Wells
“If only I had thought of a Kodak! I could have flashed that glimpse of the Under-world in a second, and examined it at leisure.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“In the middle of the night she woke up dreaming of huge white heads like turnips, that came trailing after her, at the end of interminable necks, and with vast black eyes. But being a sensible woman, she subdued her terrors and turned over and went to sleep again.”
H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man
“It continued to swear with that breadth and variety that distinguishes the swearing of a cultivated man.”
H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man
“It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have a huge variety of needs and dangers.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“It is from the festering humiliations of peoples that arrogant religious propagandas spring.”
H.G. Wells
The Outline of History
“It is good to stop by the track for a space, put aside the knapsack, wipe the brows, and talk a little of the upper slopes of the mountain we think we are climbing, would but the trees let us see it.”
H.G. Wells
A Modern Utopia
“It is love and reason,’ I said,’fleeing from all the madness of war.”
H.G. Wells
A Dream of Armageddon
“It is really in the end a far more humane proceeding than our earthly method of leaving children to grow into human beings, and then making machines of them.”
H.G. Wells
The First Men in the Moon
“It isn’t a natural thing to keep on worrying about the morality of one’s material prosperity. These are proclivities superinduced by modern conditions of the conscience. There is a natural resistance in every healthy human being to such distressful heart-searchings.”
H.G. Wells
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman
“It seems to me now almost incredibly wonderful that, with that swift fate hanging over us, men could go about their petty concerns as they did.”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“It sounds plausible enough tonight, but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“It spread up the sides of the pit by the third or fourth day of our imprisonment, and its cactus-like branches formed a carmine fringe to the edges of our triangular window.”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“It was not the first time that conscience has turned against the methods of research.”
H.G. Wells
The Island of Dr. Moreau
“It was Plutarch, you know, and nothing intrinsically American that prevented George Washington being a King.”
H.G. Wells
Tono-Bungay
“I’ve never really planned my life or set out to live. I happened; things happened to me. It’s so with everyone.”
H.G. Wells
The History of Mr. Polly
“Let us drink more particularly to the coming of the day when men beyond there will learn to distinguish between qualitative and quantitative questions, to temper good intentions with good intelligence, and righteousness with wisdom. One of the darkest evils of our world is surely the unteachable wildness of the Good.”
H.G. Wells
A Modern Utopia
“Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die.”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“Man had been content to live in ease and delight upon the labours of his fellow-man, had taken Necessity as his watchword and excuse, and in the fullness of time Necessity had come home to him.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“Modern war, modern international hostility is, I believe, possible only through the stupid illiteracy of the mass of men and the conceit and intellectual indolence of rulers and those who feed the public mind.”
H.G. Wells
A Modern Utopia
“Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.”
H.G. Wells
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman
“Most of the social and political ills from which you suffer are under your control, given only the will and courage to change them. You can live in another and a wiser fashion if you choose to think it out and work it out. You are not awake to your own power.” (H.G. Wells Quotes)
H.G. Wells
A Short History of the World
“Mr. Thomas Marvel hated roomy shoes, but then he hated damp. He had never properly thought out which he hated most”
H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man
“My days I devote to reading and experiments in chemistry, and I spend many of the clear nights in the study of astronomy. There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope.”
H.G. Wells
The Island of Dr. Moreau
“Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“Not to talk, to remain impassive and as far as possible in profile; these were the lessons that old Dubois had mastered years ago. To seem to know all, to betray no surprise, to refuse to hurry—itself a confession of miscalculation; by attention to these simple rules, Dubois had built up a steady reputation from the days when he had been a promising junior officer, a still, almost abstracted young man, deliberate but ready.”
H.G. Wells
The World Set Free
“Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of being”
H.G. Wells
A Modern Utopia
“Nothing is so pleasing to perplexed unhappy people as the denunciation of others.”
H.G. Wells
The Shape of Things to Come
“Now what sort of books will he need? There is his imagination to be fed. That, after all, is the crown of every education. The crown – as sound habits of mind and conduct are the throne. No imagination at all is brutality; a base imagination is lust and cowardice; but a noble imagination is God walking the earth again.”
H.G. Wells
The Food of the Gods
“On the village green an inclined strong, down which, clinging the while to a pulley-swung handle, one could be hurled violently against a sack at the other end, came in for considerable favour among the adolescent, as also did the swings and the cocoanut shies.”
H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man
“One cannot always be magnificent, but simplicity is always a possible alternative.”
H.G. Wells
The First Men in the Moon
“One may as well starve one’s body out of a place as to starve one’s soul in one.”
H.G. Wells
In the Days of the Comet
“One of those pertinacious tempers that would warm every day to a white heat and never again cool to forgiveness.”
H.G. Wells
The Island of Dr. Moreau
“Only people who are well off can be – complex.”
H.G. Wells
Love and Mr. Lewisham
“Our mental existences, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“Over me, about me, closing in on me, embracing me ever nearer, was the Eternal, that which was before the beginning and that which triumphs over the end; that enormous void in which all light and life and being is but the thin and vanishing splendour of a falling star, the cold, the stillness, the silence, – the infinite and final Night of space.”
H.G. Wells
The First Men in the Moon
“Particularly nauseous were the blank expressionless faces of people in trains and omnibuses; they seemed no more my fellow-creatures than dead bodies would be, so that I did not dare to travel unless I was assured of being alone.”
H.G. Wells
The Island of Dr. Moreau
“Perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of being.”
H.G. Wells
A Modern Utopia
“Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods. I do not know how far my experience is common. At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all. This feeling was very strong upon me that night. Here was another side to my dream.”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“Presently he added to himself the power of the horse and the ox, he borrowed the carrying strength of water and the driving force of the wind, he quickened his fire by blowing, and his simple tools, pointed first with copper and then with iron, increased and varied”
H.G. Wells
When the Sleeper Wakes
“Restraint, soberness, the matured thought, the unselfish act, they are necessities of the barbarous state, the life of dangers. Dourness is man’s tribute to unconquered nature.”
H.G. Wells
When the Sleeper Wakes
“So long as there are sheep Nature will insist on beasts of prey.”
H.G. Wells
When the Sleeper Wakes
“So long as you are alive you are just the moment, perhaps, but when you are dead then you are all your life from the first moment to the last.”
H.G. Wells
The World Set Free
“So utterly at variance is Destiny with all the little plans of men.”
H.G. Wells
The First Men in the Moon
“Suddenly, like a thing falling upon me from without, came fear.”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“That these man-like creatures were in truth only bestial monsters, mere grotesque travesties of men, filled me with a vague uncertainty of their possibilities which was far worse than any definite fear.”
H.G. Wells
The Island of Dr. Moreau
“The adolescent years of any fairly intelligent youth lie open, and will always lie healthily open, to the contagion of philosophical doubts, of scorns and new ideas.”
H.G. Wells
In the Days of the Comet
“The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary government asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no decisive action.”
H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man
“The art of ignoring is one of the accomplishments of every well-bred girl, so carefully instilled that at last she can even ignore her own thoughts and her own knowledge.”
H.G. Wells
Ann Veronica
“The chances of anything man-like on Mars are a million to one”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice”
H.G. Wells
The Island of Dr. Moreau
“The fact is, the Time Traveler was one of those men who are too clever to be believed: you never felt that you saw all round him; you always suspected some subtle reserve, some ingenuity in ambush, behind his lucid frankness.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“The fertilising conflict of individualities is the ultimate meaning of the personal life.”
H.G. Wells
A Modern Utopia
“The fever of war that would presently clog vein and artery, deaden nerve, and destroy brain, had yet to develop.”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“The haunting memory of a beauty and a happiness that filled his heart with insatiable longings that made all the interests and spectacle of”
H.G. Wells
Short Stories by H.G. Wells
“The history of man is not simply the conquest of external power; it is first the conquest of those distrusts and fiercenesses, that self-concentration and intensity of animalism, that tie his hands from taking his inheritance.”
H.G. Wells
The World Set Free
“The history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external power. Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal. From the outset of his terrestrial career we find him supplementing the natural strength and bodily weapons of a beast by the heat of burning and the rough implement of stone. So he passed beyond the ape. From that he expands.” (H.G. Wells Quotes)
H.G. Wells
The World Set Free
“The immediate pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts.”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“The last twenty-three centuries of history are like the efforts of some impulsive, hasty immortal to think clearly and live rightly. Blunder follows blunder; promising beginnings end in grotesque disappointments; streams of living water are poisoned by the cup that conveys them to the thirsty lips of mankind. But the hope of men rises again at last after every disaster.”
H.G. Wells
The Outline of History
“The man was running away with the rest, and selling his papers for a shilling each as he ran—a grotesque mingling of profit and panic.”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“The man who had just entered the shop was a short, slight, hunched, beetle-browed man, with long arms and very short bandy legs.”
H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man
“The only path of escape he could conceive as yet for Lady Harman lay through the chivalry of some other man. That a woman could possibly rebel against one man without the sympathy and moral maintenance of another was still outside the range of Mr. Brumley’s understanding. It is still outside the range of most men’s understandings – and of a great many women’s.”
H.G. Wells
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman
“The pain had passed. I thought I was killing myself and I did not care.”
H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man
“The power of destruction which had once been the ultimate privilege of government was now the only power left in the world–and it was everywhere.”
H.G. Wells
The World Set Free
“The red tongues that went licking up my heap of wood were an altogether new and strange thing to Weena.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“The situation was primordial. The Man beneath prevailed for a moment over the civilised superstructure, the Draper. He pushed at the pedals with archaic violence. So Palaeolithic man may have ridden his simple bicycle of chipped flint in pursuit of his exogamous affinity.”
H.G. Wells
The Wheels of Chance
“The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand.”
H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man
“The thing they wanted they called the Vote, but that demand so hollow, so eyeless, had all the terrifying effect of a mask. Behind that mask was a formless invincible discontent with the lot of womanhood. It wanted, — it was not clear what it wanted, but whatever it wanted, all the domestic instincts of mankind were against admitting there was anything it could want.”
H.G. Wells
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman
“The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“The too perfect security of the Upper-worlders had led them to a slow movement of degeneration, a general dwindling in size strength and intelligence.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“The truly brave man is not the man who does not feel fear but the man who overcomes it.
H.G. Wells
The Food of the Gods
“The tumultuous noise resolved itself now into the disorderly mingling of many voices, the gride of many wheels, the creaking of wagons, and the staccato of hoofs.”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“Then suddenly the humour of the situation came into my mind: the thought of the years I had spent in study and toil to get into the future age, and now my passion of anxiety to get out of it.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“There are no circumstances in the world that determined action cannot alter, unless, perhaps, they are the walls of a prison cell, and even those will dissolve and change, I am told, into the infirmary compartment, at any rate, for the man who can fast with resolution.”
H.G. Wells
The History of Mr. Polly
“There are occasions when a moralising novelist can merely wring his hands and leave matters to take their course.”
H.G. Wells
The Wheels of Chance
“There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“There can be no real social stability or any general human happiness while large areas of the world and large classes of people are in a phase of civilisation different from the prevailing mass. It is impossible now to have great blocks of population misunderstanding the generally accepted social purpose or at an economic disadvantage to the rest.”
H.G. Wells
The World Set Free
“There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“There is no liberty, save wisdom and self-control. Liberty is within–not without. It is each man’s own affair.”
H.G. Wells
When the Sleeper Wakes
“There is not much scope for the modification of a species in four or five hundred generations. Make men and women only sufficiently jealous or fearful or drunken or angry, and the hot red eyes of the cavemen will glare out at us to-day. We have writing and teaching, science and power; we have tamed the beasts and schooled the lightning; but we are still only shambling towards the light. We have tamed and bred the beasts, but we have still to tame and breed ourselves.”
H.G. Wells
The Outline of History
“There is only one sort of man who is absolutely to blame for his own misery, and that is the man who finds life dull and dreary.”
H.G. Wells
The History of Mr. Polly
“There is still something in everything I do that defeats me, makes me dissatisfied, challenges me to further effort. Sometimes I rise above my level, sometimes I fall below it, but always I fall short of the things I dream.”
H.G. Wells
The Island of Dr. Moreau
“There is very little deliberate wickedness in the world. The stupidity of our selfishness gives much the same results indeed, but in the ethical laboratory it shows a different nature.”
H.G. Wells
The Wheels of Chance
“There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven.”
H.G. Wells
The Island of Dr. Moreau
“There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope. I hope, or I could not live.”
H.G. Wells
The Island of Dr. Moreau
“There was something in the very air of it that exhilarated, that gave one a sense of lightness and good happening and well-being; there was something in the sight of it that made all its colour clean and perfect and subtly luminous. In the instant of coming into it one was exquisitely glad-as only in rare moments and when one is young and joyful one can be glad in this world.”
H.G. Wells
Short Stories by H.G. Wells
“There’s nothing wrong in suffering, if you suffer for a purpose. Our revolution didn’t abolish danger or death. It simply made danger and death worthwhile.”
H.G. Wells
The Shape of Things to Come
“There’s some extraordinary things in books,” said the mariner.”
H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man
“There’s truths you have to grow into.”
H.G. Wells
Love and Mr. Lewisham
“These changes have not come upon our world from without. No meteorite from outer space has struck our planet; there have been no overwhelming outbreaks of volcanic violence or strange epidemic diseases; the sun has not flared up to excessive heat or suddenly shrunken to plunge us into Arctic winter. The changes have come through men themselves.” (H.G. Wells Quotes)
H.G. Wells
The Open Conspiracy
“These Eloi were mere fatted cattle, which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and preyed upon-probably saw to the breeding of. And there was Weena dancing at my side”
H.G. Wells
Short Stories by H.G. Wells
“They haven’t any spirit in them – no proud dreams and no proud lusts; and a man who hasn’t one or the other-Lord! What is he but funk and precautions.”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“They were put into my pockets by Weena, when I traveled into Time.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“Think of what earthquakes and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before men! Did you think God had exempted Weybridge? He is not an insurance agent.”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then comes languor and decay.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“This isn’t a war,” said the artilleryman. “It never was a war, any more than there’s war between man and ants.”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“This little upset across the water doesn’t mean anything. Threatened men live long and threatened wars never occur.”
H.G. Wells
The Shape of Things to Come
“This self-reliance, this direct dealing with the world, seemed to him, even in the height of his concern, unwomanly, a deeper injury to his own abandoned assumptions than any he had contemplated.”
H.G. Wells
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman
“To ride a bicycle properly is very like a love affair—chiefly it is a matter of faith. Believe you do it, and the thing is done; doubt, and, for the life of you, you cannot.”
H.G. Wells
The Wheels of Chance
“To sit among all those unknown things before a puzzle like that is hopeless. That way lies monomania. Face this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“To-day is the day of wealth. Wealth now is power as it never was power before—it commands earth and sea and sky. All power is for those who can handle wealth. On your behalf.”
H.G. Wells
When the Sleeper Wakes
“Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“Under this tremendous dawn of power and freedom, under a sky ablaze with promise, in the very presence of science standing like some bountiful goddess over all the squat darknesses of human life, holding patiently in her strong arms, until men chose to take them, security, plenty, the solution of riddles, the key of the bravest adventures, in her very presence, and with the earnest of her gifts in court, the world was to witness such things as the squalid spectacle of the Dass-Tata patent litigation.”
H.G. Wells
The World Set Free
“Until a man has found God and been found by God, he begins at no beginning, and works to no end. He may have friendships, his partial loyalties, his scraps of honor. But all these things fall into place and life falls into place only with God. Only with God. God, who fights through men against Blind Force and Night and Non-Existence; who is the end, who is the meaning. He is the only king.”
H.G. Wells
Mr. Britling Sees it Through
“Until under the stimulus of accumulating material, accumulating investments or other circumstances, the tide of private enterprise flowed again.”
H.G. Wells
A Modern Utopia
“Usually also governments under these stresses borrow money, that is to say, they issue interest-bearing paper, secured on the willingness and ability of the general community to endure taxation. Such operations would be difficult enough if they were carried out frankly by perfectly honest men, in the full light of publicity and scientific knowledge. But hitherto this has never been the case; at every point the clever egotist, the bad rich man, is trying to deflect things a little to his own advantage. Everywhere too one finds the stupid egotist ready to take fright and break into panic.”
H.G. Wells
The Outline of History
“Utopia still made use of printed books ; books were still the simplest, clearest way of bringing statement before a tranquil mind.”
H.G. Wells
Men Like Gods
“We are always getting away from the present moment. Our mental existence, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“We are always getting away from the present moment.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“We are but phantoms and the phantoms of phantoms, desires like cloud-shadows and wills of straw that eddy in the wind; the days pass, use and won’t carry us through as a train carries the shadow of its lights – so be it! But one thing is real and certain, one thing is no dream-stuff, but eternal and enduring. It is the centre of my life, and all other things about it are subordinate or altogether vain. I loved her, that woman of a dream. And she and I are dead together!”
H.G. Wells
A Dream of Armageddon
“We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“We can’t have any weak or silly. Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die. It’s a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race.”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“We do our job and go. See? That is what Death is for. We work out all our little brains and all our little emotions, and then this lot begins afresh. Fresh and fresh! Perfectly simple. What’s the trouble?”
H.G. Wells
The Food of the Gods
“We should remember how repulsive our carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit.”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“We should strive to welcome change and challenges, because they are what help us grow. With out them we grow weak like the Eloi in comfort and security. We need to constantly be challenging ourselves in order to strengthen our character and increase our intelligence. ” (H.G. Wells Quotes)
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“What a huge inaccessible lumber-room of thought and experience we amounted to, I thought; how much we are, how little we transmit.”
H.G. Wells
The Passionate Friends
“What else can happen when men use science and every new thing that science gives, and all their available intelligence and energy to manufacture wealth and appliances, and leave government and education to the rustling traditions of hundreds of years ago?”
H.G. Wells
The World Set Free
“What I want to know is, in the Middle Ages, did they do anything for Housemaid’s Knee? What did they put in their hot baths after jousting?”
H.G. Wells
Tono-Bungay
“What is this spirit in man that urges him forever to depart from happiness and security, to toil, to place himself in danger, even to risk a reasonable certainty of death? It dawned upon me up there in the moon as a thing I ought always to have known, that man is not made simply to go about being safe and comfortable and well fed and amused. Against his interest, against his happiness he is constantly being driven to do unreasonable things. Some force not himself impels him and go he must.”
H.G. Wells
The First Men in the Moon
“When Barnet returned his men were already calling out for water, and all day long the line of pits suffered greatly from thirst. For food they had chocolate and bread.”
H.G. Wells
The World Set Free
“When the mind grapples with a great and intricate problem, it makes its advances step by step, with but little realization of the gains it has made, until suddenly, with an effect of abrupt illumination, it realizes its victory. So it happened to Gautama.”
H.G. Wells
A Short History of the World
“With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter.”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“With wine and food, the confidence of my own table, and the necessity of reassuring my wife, I grew by insensible degrees courageous and secure.”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.”
H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds
“You are not mechanics, you are warriors. You have been trained, not to think, but to do.”
H.G. Wells
The Shape of Things to Come
“You cannot imagine the craving for rest that I feel—a hunger and thirst. For six long days, since my work was done, my mind has been a whirlpool, swift, unprogressive and incessant, a torrent of thoughts leading nowhere, spinning round swift and steady”
H.G. Wells
When the Sleeper Wakes
“You cannot imagine the strange colour-less delight of these intellectual desires.”
H.G. Wells
The Island of Dr. Moreau
“You have to widen the horizons of your children, encourage and intensify their curiosity and their creative impulses, and cultivate and enlarge their sympathies. That is what you are for.”
H.G. Wells
The World Set Free
“You know that great pause that comes upon things before the dusk? Even the breeze stops in the trees. To me there is always an air of expectation about that evening stillness. The sky was clear, remote, and empty save for a few horizontal bars far down in the sunset. Well, that night the expectation took the colour of my fears.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, they taught you at school is founded on a misconception.”
H.G. Wells
The Time Machine
“You’re a solemn prig, Prendick, a silly ass! You’re always fearing and fancying. We’re on the edge of things. I’m bound to cut my throat tomorrow. I’m going to have a damned Bank Holiday tonight.”
H.G. Wells
The Island of Dr. Moreau
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