Top 450 H. G. Wells Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no writer, up to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed any idea that intelligent life might have developed there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. Nor was it generally understood that since Mars is older than our earth, with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter from the sun, it necessarily follows that it is not only more distant from time’s beginning but nearer its end.”

— H. G. Wells

152. “Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men? “Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men? “Not to eat Fish or Flesh; that is the Law. Are we not Men? “Not to claw the Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not Men? “Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?”

— H. G. Wells

153. “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. He was wrapped up from head to foot, and the brim of his soft felt hat hid every inch of his face but the shiny tip of his nose;.”

— H. G. Wells

154. “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

155. “Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims.”

— H. G. Wells

156. “So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour.”

— H. G. Wells

157. “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

158. “The serious people who took him seriously never felt quite sure of his deportment; they were somehow aware that trusting their reputations for judgment with him was like furnishing a nursery with egg-shell china.”

— H. G. Wells

159. “My mood, I say, was one of exaltation. I felt as a seeing man might do, with padded feet and noiseless clothes, in a city of the blind. I experienced a wild impulse to jest, to startle people, to clap men on the back, fling people’s hats astray, and generally revel in my extraordinary advantage.”

— H. G. Wells

160. “The State’s your mother, your father, the totality of your interests. No discipline can be too severe for the man that denies thatby word or deed.”

— H. G. Wells

161. “Democracy’s ceremonial, its feast, it’s great function, is the election.”

— H. G. Wells

162. “He walked with just such a limp as I have seen in footsore tramps.”

— H. G. Wells

163. “The fact is, the Time Traveller 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

164. “For neither do men live nor die in vain. Here.”

— H. G. Wells

165. “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

166. “The German people are an orderly, vain, deeply sentimental and rather insensitive people. They seem to feel at their best when they are singing in chorus, saluting or obeying orders.”

— H. G. Wells

167. “His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated.”

— H. G. Wells

168. “Help me – and I will do great things for you. An invisible man is a man of power.” He.”

— H. G. Wells

169. “Everyone leaves the world a little better some by leaving.”

— H. G. Wells

170. “I do not know if hell is hot or cold, or what sort of place hell may be, but this I surely know, that if there is any hell at all it will be badly lit. And it will taste like a train.”

— H. G. Wells

171. “Ambition – what is the good of pride of place when you cannot appear there? What is the good of the love of woman when her name must needs be Delilah?”

— H. G. Wells

172. “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

173. “Fools make researches and wise men exploit them – that is our earthly way of dealing with the question, and we thank Heaven for an assumed abundance of financially impotent and sufficiently ingenious fools.”

— H. G. Wells

174. “Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life – the true civilizing process that makes life more and more secure – had gone steadily on to a climax... And the harvest was what I saw.”

— H. G. Wells

175. “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

176. “Patriotism has become a mere national self assertion, a sentimentality of flag-cheering with no constructive duties.”

— H. G. Wells

177. “The Jews looked for a special savior, a messiah, who was to redeem mankind by the agreeable process of restoring the fabulous glories of David and Solomon, and bringing the whole world at last under the firm but benevolent Jewish heel.”

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

179. “This world is out of joint. It’s broken up and I doubt if it’ll heal. I doubt very much if it’ll heal. We are in the beginning of the sickness of the world!”

— H. G. Wells

180. “Chess is a curse upon a man.”

— H. G. Wells

181. “A door onbust is always open to bustin’, but ye can’t onbust a door once you’ve busted en.”

— H. G. Wells

182. “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

183. “I had seen the Magic Shop from afar several times; I had passed it once or twice, a shop window of alluring little objects, magic balls, magic hens, wonderful cones, ventriloquist dolls, the material of the basket trick, packs of cards that looked all right, and all that sort of thing, but never had I thought of going in until one day, almost without warning, Gip hauled me by my finger right up to the window, and so conducted himself that there was nothing for it but to take him in.”

— H. G. Wells

184. “The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary government asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no decisive action.”

— H. G. Wells

185. “I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.”

— H. G. Wells

186. “A young mistress is better than an old master.”

— H. G. Wells

187. “You can show black is white by argument,′ said Filby, ’but you will never convince me.”

— H. G. Wells

188. “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

189. “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

190. “Surely, if we have learned nothing else, this war has taught us pity – pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominion.”

— H. G. Wells

191. “I don’t think you fully appreciate the importance of Illusion in life, the Essential Nature of Lies and Deception of the body politic.”

— H. G. Wells

192. “Marriage isn’t what it was. It’s become a different thing because women have become human beings.”

— H. G. Wells

193. “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

194. “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

195. “Our chairs, being his patents, embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat upon, and there was that luxurious after-dinner atmosphere when thought runs gracefully free of the trammels of precision.”

— H. G. Wells

196. “We have learned now that we cannot regard this planet as being fenced in and a secure abiding place for Man we can never anticipate the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space.”

— H. G. Wells

197. “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

198. “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

199. “It’s a beast of a country,” said the Voice. “And pigs for people.”

— H. G. Wells

200. “But I was too restless to watch long; I’m too Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours – that’s another matter.”

— H. G. Wells