H.G. Wells Quotes

This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then comes languor and decay.

With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter.

But I know it was a dull white, and had strange large greyish-red eyes; also that there was flaxen hair on its head and down its back.

The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.

I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then.

Civilization is a race between disaster and education.

Be a man!... What good is religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! Did you think that God had exempted [us]? He is no...

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!

Go to the devil! said the stranger in a tremendous voice, and Shut that door after you. So that brief interview terminated.

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.

In our growing science of hypnotism we find the promise of a possibility of replacing old inherent instincts by new suggestions, grafting upon or replacing the inherited fixed ideas. Very much indeed...

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.

They know they dare not have their stuff stripped down to plain words. These Bishops and parsons with their beloved Christianity are like a man who has poisoned his wife and says her body's too sacred...

Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness.

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 t...

Wells recognized that these crude novels correctly foresaw modern warfare as aiming at the massive destruction of the physical structures of an enemy civilization and the terrorizing if not annihilati...

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 lit...

What, unless biological science is a mass of errors, is the cause of human intelligence and vigour? Hardship and freedom: conditions under which the active, strong, and subtle survive and the weaker g...

You cannot imagine the strange colour-less delight of these intellectual desires.

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.