The First Men in the Moon Quotes

“So utterly at variance is Destiny with all the little plans of men.”
― H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon

“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

“One can't always be magnificent, but simplicity is always a possible alternative.”
― H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon

“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

“Sooner or later it must come out, even if other men rediscover it. And then...Governments and powers will struggle to get hither, they will fight against one another and against these moon people. It will only spread warfare and multiply the occasions of war. In a little while, in a very little while if I tell my secret, this planet to it's deepest galleries will be strewn with human dead. Other things are doubtful, but this is certain...It is not as though man had any use for the moon. What good would the moon be to men? Even of their own planet what have they made but a battleground and theatre of infinite folly? Small as his world is, and short as his time, he has still in his little life down there far more than he can do. No! Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use. It is time she held her hand. Let him find it out for himself again-in a thousand years' time.”
― H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon

“What good would the moon be to men? Even of their own planet what have they made but a battleground and theatre of infinite folly? Small as his world is, and short as his time, he has still in his little life down there far more than he can do.”
― H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon

“He sighed and looked about him. 'This is no world for men,' he said. 'And yet in a way...it appeals.”
― H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon

“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, The First Men in the Moon

“It's this accursed science.... It's the very Devil. The medieval priests and persecutors were right and the Moderns are all wrong. You tamper with it--and it offers you gifts. And directly you take them it knocks you to pieces in some unexpected way. Old passions and new weapons--now it upsets your religion, now it upsets your social ideas, now it whirls you off to desolation and misery!”
― H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon

“...the sense of my utter loneliness had been agony...”
― H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon

“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

“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

“Those who have only seen the starry sky from the earth cannot imagine its appearance when the vague, half luminous veil of our air has been withdrawn. The stars we see on earth are the mere scattered survivors that penetrate our misty atmosphere. But now at last I could realise the meaning of the hosts of heaven!”
― H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon

“I saw with colourless interest that the rocks of the basin ... were all veined and splattered with gold, that here and there bosses of rounded and wrinkled gold projected from among the litter. What did that matter now? ... Then I supposed I should exert myself, obeying that unreasonable imperative that urges a man before all things to preserve and defend his life, albeit he may preserve it only to die more painfully in a little while.”
― H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon

“His idea was to begin with those broad truths that must underlie all conceivable mental existences and establish a basis on those. The great principles of geometry, to begin with. He proposed to take some leading proposition of Euclid's, and show by construction that its truth was known to us, to demonstrate, for example, that the angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal, and that if the equal sides be produced the angles on the other side of the base are equal also, or that the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the two other sides. By demonstrating our knowledge of these things we should demonstrate our possession of a reasonable intelligence.”
― H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon

“I took my line straight away. I knew I was staking everything, but I jumped there and then. "We're on absolutely the biggest thing that has ever been invented," I said, and put the accent on "we." "If you want to keep me out of this, you'll have to do it with a gun. I'm coming down to be your fourth labourer to-morrow.”
― H. G. Wells, The First Men on the Moon

“هل تقصد أن تقول أنكم تنتقلون من مكان إلى مكان فوق سطح عالمكم.. هذا العالم الذي بدأتم بالكاد في كشف ثرواته.. لتقتلون بعضكم بعضا من أجل بهائم تأكلونها؟”
― H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon