Top 450 H. G. Wells Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “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

202. “He has made the cat his own. He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world. English cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves.”

— H. G. Wells

203. “How small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem, at a distance of a few million miles.”

— H. G. Wells

204. “I am just a human being – solid, needing food and drink, needing covering too – But I’m invisible. You see? Invisible. Simple idea. Invisible.”

— H. G. Wells

205. “Is it any wonder that to this day this Galilean is too much for our small hearts?”

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

207. “There comes a moment in the day when you have written your pages in the morning, attended to your correspondence in the afternoon, and have nothing further to do. Then comes that hour when you are bored; that’s the time for sex.”

— H. G. Wells

208. “The sea was silent, the sky was silent; I was alone with the night and silence.”

— H. G. Wells

209. “The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice. Yet had I known such pain was in the next room, and had it been dumb, I believe – I have thought since – I could have stood it well enough. It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us. But.”

— H. G. Wells

210. “I was invisible, and I was only just beginning to realise the extraordinary advantage my invisibility gave me. My head was already teeming with plans of all the wild and wonderful things I had now impunity to do.”

— H. G. Wells

211. “There’s truths you have to grow into.”

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

213. “What is your theologian’s ecstasy but Mahomet’s houri in the dark?”

— H. G. Wells

214. “I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a.”

— H. G. Wells

215. “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.”

— H. G. Wells

216. “Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.”

— H. G. Wells

217. “Ages ago, thousands of generations ago, man had thrust his brother man out of the ease and the sunshine. And now that brother was coming back – changed!”

— H. G. Wells

218. “We will peck them to death to-morrow, my dear.”

— H. G. Wells

219. “But you begin now to realise,” said the Invisible Man, “the full disadvantage of my condition. I had no shelter – no covering – to get clothing was to forego all my advantage, to make myself a strange and terrible thing. I was fasting; for to eat, to fill myself with unassimilated matter, would be to become grotesquely visible again.”

— H. G. Wells

220. “Time is only a kind of Space.”

— H. G. Wells

221. “There is no way out or round or through.”

— H. G. Wells

222. “You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, they taught you at school is founded on a misconception.”

— H. G. Wells

223. “The science hangs like a gathering fog in a valley, a fog which begins nowhere and goes nowhere, an incidental, unmeaning inconvenience to passers-by.”

— H. G. Wells

224. “But the Modern Utopia must not be static but kinetic, must shape not as a permanent state but as a hopeful stage, leading to a long ascent of stages. Nowadays we do not resist and overcome the great stream of things, but rather float upon it. We build now not citadels, but ships of state.”

— H. G. Wells

225. “He lit the dining-room lamp, got out a cigar, and began pacing the room, ejaculating.”

— H. G. Wells

226. “But he was one of those weak creatures, void of pride, timorous, anemic, hateful souls, full of shifty cunning, who face neither God nor man, who face not even themselves.”

— H. G. Wells

227. “Man had been content to live in ease and delight upon the labours of his fellow-man, had taken Necessity as his watchword and excuse, and in the fullness of time Necessity had come home to him.”

— H. G. Wells

228. “He said very little, but his eyes were eloquent; the clutch of his arms was eloquent. He was the playground of unspeakable emotions. These, you know, were real Magics.”

— H. G. Wells

229. “I never yet heard of a useless thing that was not ground out of existence by evolution sooner or later. Did you? And pain gets needless.”

— H. G. Wells

230. “We were not making war against Germany, we were being ordered about in the King’s war with Germany.”

— H. G. Wells

231. “We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century – for several centuries.”

— H. G. Wells

232. “To do such a thing would be to transcend magic. And I beheld, unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of all that invisibility might mean to a man – the mystery, the power, the freedom. Drawbacks.”

— H. G. Wells

233. “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

234. “Suddenly, like a thing falling upon me from without, came fear.”

— H. G. Wells

235. “But to me the future is still black and blank–is a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story. And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers –shrivelled 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 man.”

— H. G. Wells

236. “The fertilising conflict of individualities is the ultimate meaning of the personal life.”

— H. G. Wells

237. “There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.”

— H. G. Wells

238. “If the world does not please you, you can change it.”

— H. G. Wells

239. “It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.”

— H. G. Wells

240. “There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change.”

— H. G. Wells

241. “I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes – to come to this at last.”

— H. G. Wells

242. “There is no remorse like the remorse of Chess.”

— H. G. Wells

243. “The uglier a man’s legs are, the better he plays golf – it’s almost a law.”

— H. G. Wells

244. “They haven’t any spirit in them – no proud dreams and no proud lusts; and a man who hasn’t one or the other-Lord! What is he but funk and precautions.”

— H. G. Wells

245. “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

246. “Once the command of the air is obtained by one of the contending armies, the war becomes a conflict between a seeing host and one that is blind.”

— H. G. Wells

247. “Money means in a thousand minds a thousand subtly different, roughly similar, systems of images, associations, suggestions and impulses.”

— H. G. Wells

248. “She was exactly like a child. She wanted to be with me always. She tried to follow me everywhere, and on my next journey out and about it went to my heart to tire her down, and leave her at last, exhausted and calling after me rather plaintively. But the problems of the world had to be mastered. I had not, I said to myself, come into the future to carry on a miniature flirtation.”

— H. G. Wells

249. “Every conceivable sort of silly creature that has ever been created has been sent to cross me.”

— H. G. Wells

250. “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. There is must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope. I hope, or I could not live. And so, in hope and solitude, my story ends.”

— H. G. Wells