Top 450 H. G. Wells Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Fine hospitality,” said I, “to a man who has travelled innumerable years to see you.”

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

253. “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

254. “But the Time Traveller had more than a touch of whim among his elements, and we distrusted him.”

— H. G. Wells

255. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “This blessed gift of smoking!”

— H. G. Wells

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

267. “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

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. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

275. “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

276. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

278. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

280. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

282. “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

283. “Bless my soul alive!”

— H. G. Wells

284. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

287. “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

288. “Security sets a premium on feebleness.”

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

291. “Hunger and a lack of blood-corpuscles take all the manhood from a man.”

— H. G. Wells

292. “The army ages men sooner than the law and philosophy; it exposes them more freely to germs, which undermine and destroy, and it shelters them more completely from thought, which stimulates and preserves.”

— H. G. Wells

293. “I felt all the wretcheder for the lack of a breakfast. Hunger and a lack of blood-corpuscles take all the manhood from a man.”

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

295. “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

296. “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

297. “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

298. “I thought I was killing myself and I did not care.”

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

300. “Then very haltingly at first, but afterwards more easily, he began to tell of the thing that was hidden in his life, the haunting memory of a beauty and a happiness that filled his heart with insatiable longings, that made all the interests and spectacle of worldly life seem dull and tedious and vain to him.”

— H. G. Wells