H.G. Wells > Quotes

“The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.”
― H.G. Wells

“If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.”
― H.G. Wells

“Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.”
― H.G. Wells

“Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.”
― H.G. Wells

“If we don't end war, war will end us.”
― H.G. Wells

“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”
― H.G. Wells

“Advertising is legalized lying.”
― H.G. Wells

“Sometimes, you have to step outside of the person you've been and remember the person you were meant to be. The person you want to be. The person you are.”
― H.G. Wells

“It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening.”
― H.G. Wells

“Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.”
― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

“No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.”
― H.G. Wells

“Losing your way on a journey is unfortunate. But, losing your reason for the journey is a fate more cruel.”
― H.G. Wells

“Our true nationality is mankind.”
― H.G. Wells

“once you lose yourself, you have two choices: find the person you used to be, or lose that person completely.”
― H.G. Wells

“What on earth would a man do with himself, if something did not stand in his way?”
― H.G. Wells

“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

“What really matters is what you do with what you have.”
― H.G. Wells

“We all have our time machines, don't we. Those that take us back are memories...And those that carry us forward, are dreams.”
― H.G. Wells

“If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it.”
― H.G. Wells

“Civilization is a race between disaster and education.”
― H.G. Wells

“I hope, or I could not live.”
― H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau

“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, The Time Machine

“We all have our time machines.Those that take us back are memories...And those that carry us forward,are dreams!”
― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

“Are we all bubbles blown by a baby?”
― H.G. Wells

“New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled the humiliating question arises 'Why then are you not taking part in them?”
― H.G. Wells

“For after the Battle comes quiet.”
― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

“There's truths you have to grow into.”
― H.G. Wells, Love and Mr. Lewisham

“It may be that we exist and cease to exist in alternations, like the minute dots in some forms of toned printing or the succession of pictures on a cinema film. It may be that reality is an illusion of movement in an eternal, static, multidimensional universe. We may be only a story written on the ground of the inconceivable; the pattern on a rug beneath the feet of the incomprehensible.”
― H.G. Wells

“We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle and mystery.”
― H.G. Wells

“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

“When she was fifteen if you'd told her
that when she was twenty she'd be going
to bed with bald-headed men and liking it,
she would have thought you very abstract.”
― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

“The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.”
― H.G. Wells

“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

“He began to realize that you cannot even fight happily with creatures that stand upon a different mental basis to yourself.”
― H.G. Wells

“Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough---as most wrong theories are!”
― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

“I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there.”
― H.G. Wells

“It's no use locking the door after the steed is stolen.”
― H.G. Wells

“In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
― H.G. Wells

“Only people who are well off can be - complex.”
― H.G. Wells, Love and Mr. Lewisham

“Night, the mother of fear and mystery,
was coming upon me.”
― H.G. Wells

“Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.”
― H.G. Wells

“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

“A time will come when a politician who has wilfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own.”
― H.G. Wells

“Room to swing a cat, it seemed was absolutely essential. It was an infrequent but indispensable operation.”
― H.G. Wells, Kipps

“Civilization is in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.”
― H.G. Wells

“An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.”
― H.G. Wells

“Things that would have made fame of a less clever man seemed tricks in his hands. It is a mistake to do things too easily.”
― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

“Very much indeed of what we call moral education is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion.”
― H.G. Wells

“All men, however highly educated, retain some superstitious inklings.”
― H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man

“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