Top 450 H. G. Wells Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And.”

— H. G. Wells

252. “Our business here is to be Utopian, to make vivid and credible, if we can, first this facet and then that, of an imaginary whole and happy world.”

— H. G. Wells

253. “By this time I was no longer very much terrified or very miserable. I had, as it were, passed the limit of terror and despair. I felt now that my life was practically lost, and that persuasion made me capable of daring anything.”

— H. G. Wells

254. “Fine hospitality,” said I, “to a man who has travelled innumerable years to see you.”

— H. G. Wells

255. “I stood staring, not as yet realising that this was death leaping from man to man in that little distant crowd.”

— H. G. Wells

256. “I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide.”

— H. G. Wells

257. “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

258. “You’ve made a beast of yourself,- to the beasts you may go.”

— H. G. Wells

259. “Then I look about me at my fellow-men; and I go in fear. I see faces, keen and bright; others dull or dangerous; others, unsteady, insincere, – none that have the calm authority of a reasonable soul. I feel as though the animal was surging up through them;.”

— H. G. Wells

260. “Men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise.”

— H. G. Wells

261. “It is only now and then, in a jungle, or amidst the towering white menace of a burnt or burning Australian forest, that Nature strips the moral veils from vegetation and we apprehend its stark ferocity.”

— H. G. Wells

262. “This blessed gift of smoking!”

— H. G. Wells

263. “Everywhere in the world there are ignorance and prejudice, but the greatest complex of these, with the most extensive prestige and the most intimate entanglement with traditional institutions, is the Roman Catholic Church.”

— H. G. Wells

264. “There’s nothing wrong in suffering, if you suffer for a purpose. Our revolution didn’t abolish danger or death. It simply made danger and death worthwhile.”

— H. G. Wells

265. “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

266. “When she was fifteen if you’d told her that when she was twenty she’d be going to bed with bald-headed men and liking it, she would have thought you very abstract.”

— H. G. Wells

267. “I suppose everything in existence takes its colour from the average hue of our surroundings.”

— H. G. Wells

268. “But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be inhabited? .”

— H. G. Wells

269. “I do not propose to add anything to what has already been written concerning the loss of the “Lady Vain.””

— H. G. Wells

270. “In the middle of the night she woke up dreaming of huge white heads like turnips, that came trailing after her, at the end of interminable necks, and with vast black eyes. But being a sensible woman, she subdued her terrors and turned over and went to sleep again.”

— H. G. Wells

271. “And the great difference between man and monkey is in the larynx, he said, in the incapacity to frame delicately different sounding symbols by which thought could be sustained.”

— H. G. Wells

272. “I don’t suppose any man has ever understood any woman since the beginning of things. You don’t understand our imaginations, how wild our imaginations can be.”

— H. G. Wells

273. “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.”

— H. G. Wells

274. “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

275. “And the great difference between man and monkey is in the larynx.”

— H. G. Wells

276. “The fever of war that would presently clog vein and artery, deaden nerve, and destroy brain, had yet to develop.”

— H. G. Wells

277. “There is, however, a tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the beginning to the end of our lives.”

— H. G. Wells

278. “It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have a huge variety of needs and dangers.”

— H. G. Wells

279. “Great and strange ideas transcending experience often have less effect upon men and women than smaller, more tangible considerations.”

— H. G. Wells

280. “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.”

— H. G. Wells

281. “You may kill me, but I can hold you – and all the universe for that matter – in the grip of this small brain. I would not change. Even now.”

— H. G. Wells

282. “Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use. It is time she held her hand.”

— H. G. Wells

283. “Let’s be sure we’d be acting perfectly right in bustin’ that there door open. A door onbust is always open to bustin’, but ye can’t onbust a door once you’ve busted en.”

— H. G. Wells

284. “So long as there are sheep Nature will insist on beasts of prey.”

— H. G. Wells

285. “Bless my soul alive!”

— H. G. Wells

286. “He, I know – for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made – thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilisation only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end.”

— H. G. Wells

287. “You are not mechanics, you are warriors. You have been trained, not to think, but to do.”

— H. G. Wells

288. “The greatest task of democracy, its ritual and feast – is choice.”

— H. G. Wells

289. “The true objection to slavery is not that it is unjust to the inferior but that it corrupts the superior.”

— H. G. Wells

290. “Security sets a premium on feebleness.”

— H. G. Wells

291. “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

292. “All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives – all that was over.”

— H. G. Wells

293. “You know how on a flat surface, which has only two dimensions, we can represent a figure of a three-dimensional solid, and similarly they think that by models of three dimensions they could represent one of four – if they could master the perspective of the thing.”

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

296. “That these man-like creatures were in truth only bestial monsters, mere grotesque travesties of men, filled me with a vague uncertainty of their possibilities which was far worse than any definite fear.”

— H. G. Wells

297. “He had heard now of the moral decay that had followed the collapse of supernatural religion in the minds of ignoble man, the decline of public honour, the ascendency of wealth. For men who had lost their belief in God had still kept their faith in property, and wealth ruled a venial world.”

— H. G. Wells

298. “I say I became habituated to the Beast People, that a thousand things which had seemed unnatural and repulsive speedly became natural an ordinary to me. I suppose everything in existence takes its colour from the average hue of our surroundings.”

— H. G. Wells

299. “This little upset across the water doesn’t mean anything. Threatened men live long and threatened wars never occur.”

— H. G. Wells

300. “I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours – that is another matter.”

— H. G. Wells