Top 450 H. G. Wells Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Strength is the outcome of need.”

— H. G. Wells

102. “I want to go ahead of Father Time with a scythe of my own.”

— H. G. Wells

103. “The past is but the past of a beginning.”

— H. G. Wells

104. “If my phrases shock the reader, that only shows it is high time he or she was shocked.”

— H. G. Wells

105. “Only people who are well off can be – complex.”

— H. G. Wells

106. “There is no remorse like a remorse of chess. It is a curse upon man. There is no happiness in chess.”

— H. G. Wells

107. “This is the end and the beginning of an age. This is something far greater than the French Revolution or the Reformation and we live in it.”

— H. G. Wells

108. “Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was coming upon me.”

— H. G. Wells

109. “A day will come when beings, now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon Earth as a footstool and laugh, and reach out their hands amidst the stars.”

— H. G. Wells

110. “We were making the future and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it is!”

— H. G. Wells

111. “We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity.”

— H. G. Wells

112. “What good is religion if it collapses under calamity?”

— H. G. Wells

113. “I had never realised it before, but the nose is to the mind of a dog what the eye is to the mind of a seeing man. Dogs perceive the scent of a man moving as men perceive his vision.”

— H. G. Wells

114. “Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life.”

— H. G. Wells

115. “The Athenian democracy suffered much from that narrowness of patriotism which is the ruin of all nations.”

— H. G. Wells

116. “The Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to and humbug themselves for the general Good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry.”

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

118. “Nothing remains interesting where anything may happen.”

— H. G. Wells

119. “Our challenge is not to educate the children we used to have or want to have, but to educate the children who come to the schoolhouse door.”

— H. G. Wells

120. “Every time Europe looks across the Atlantic to see the American Eagle, it observes only the rear end of an ostrich.”

— H. G. Wells

121. “Will is stronger than fact: it can mold and overcome fact.”

— H. G. Wells

122. “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

123. “I hope, or I could not live.”

— H. G. Wells

124. “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

125. “Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough – as most wrong theories are!”

— H. G. Wells

126. “You see,” I said, “I’m a socialist. I don’t think this world was made for a small minority to dance on the faces of everyone else.”

— H. G. Wells

127. “You Americans have the loveliest wine in the world, you know, but you don’t realize it. You call them domestic and that’s enough to start trouble anywhere.”

— H. G. Wells

128. “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.”

— H. G. Wells

129. “So utterly at variance is Destiny with all the little plans of men.”

— H. G. Wells

130. “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

131. “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

132. “If your life doesn’t end in failure, you haven’t reached high enough. So it was failure I had to achieve.”

— H. G. Wells

133. “The true sweetness of chess, if it can ever be called sweet, is to see a victory snatched, by some happy impertinence, out of the shadows of apparently irrevocable disaster.”

— H. G. Wells

134. “I never blame anyone,” said Kemp. “It’s quite out of fashion.”

— H. G. Wells

135. “I tell you, stupidity, self-protective stupidity, is the fundamental sin. No man alive has a right to contentment. No man alive has a right to mental rest. No man has any right to be as stupid as educated, Liberal men have been about that foolish affair at Geneva. Men who have any leisure, any gifts, any resources, have no right to stifle their consciences with that degree of imposture.”

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

137. “Before, they had been beasts, their instincts fitly adapted to their surroundings, and happy as living things may be. Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence, begun in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau –.”

— H. G. Wells

138. “The brain upon which my experiences have been written is not a particularly good one. If their were brain-shows, as there are cat and dog shows, I doubt if it would get even a third class prize.”

— H. G. Wells

139. “The War That Will End War.”

— H. G. Wells

140. “This blessed gift of smoking!”

— H. G. Wells

141. “Dragging out life to the last possible second is not living to the best effect. The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat. The best of life, Passworthy, lies nearest to the edge of death.”

— H. G. Wells

142. “There is no reason whatever to believe that the order of nature has any greater bias in favour of man than it had in favour of the ichthyosaur or the pterodactyl.”

— H. G. Wells

143. “In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.”

— H. G. Wells

144. “Few people realize the immensity of vacancy.”

— H. G. Wells

145. “It’s no use locking the door after the steed is stolen.”

— H. G. Wells

146. “I see knowledge increasing and human power increasing. I see ever-increasing possibilities before life, And I see no limits set to it at all, Existence impresses me as a perpetual dawn. Our lives, as I apprehend, are great in expectations.”

— H. G. Wells

147. “Fools make researches and wise men exploit them.”

— H. G. Wells

148. “Anthropology has been compared to a great region, marked out indeed as within the sphere of influence of science, but unsettled and for the most part unsubdued. Like all such hinterland sciences, it is a happy hunting-ground for adventurers.”

— H. G. Wells

149. “Take it as a lie – or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction.”

— H. G. Wells

150. “I write to cover a frame of ideas.”

— H. G. Wells