Top 450 H. G. Wells Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “Heresies are experiments in man’s unsatisfied search for truth.”

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

304. “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

305. “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

306. “The great trouble with you Americans is that you are still under the influence of that second-rate – shall I say third-rate? – mind, Karl Marx.”

— H. G. Wells

307. “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 to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.”

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

309. “Forthwith flashes of actual flame, a bright glare leaping from one to another, sprang from the scattered group of men. It was as if some invisible jet impinged upon them and flashed into white flame. It was as if each man were suddenly and momentarily turned to fire. Then, by the light of their own destruction, I saw them staggering and falling, and their supporters turning to run.”

— H. G. Wells

310. “Room to swing a cat, it seemed was absolutely essential. It was an infrequent but indispensable operation.”

— H. G. Wells

311. “It is not much good thinking of a thing unless you think it out.”

— H. G. Wells

312. “We are all members of one body.”

— H. G. Wells

313. “Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning.”

— H. G. Wells

314. “I went over the heads of the things a man reckons desirable. No doubt invisibility made it possible to get them, but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they are got.”

— H. G. Wells

315. “And you cannot move at all in Time, you cannot get away from the present moment.”

— H. G. Wells

316. “When the history of civilization is written, it will be a biological history and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine.”

— H. G. Wells

317. “The thing they wanted they called the Vote, but that demand so hollow, so eyeless, had all the terrifying effect of a mask. Behind that mask was a formless invincible discontent with the lot of womanhood. It wanted, – it was not clear what it wanted, but whatever it wanted, all the domestic instincts of mankind were against admitting there was anything it could want.”

— H. G. Wells

318. “If you do not want to explore an egoism you should not read autobiography.”

— H. G. Wells

319. “An artist who theorizes about his work is no longer artist but critic.”

— H. G. Wells

320. “This mark men and women set on pleasure and pain, Prendick, is the mark of the beast upon them, the mark of the beast from which they came. Pain! Pain and pleasure – they are for us, only so long as we wriggle in the dust...”

— H. G. Wells

321. “Children of the Law,’ I said, ‘he is not dead.’ M’ling turned his sharp eyes on me. ‘He has changed his shape – he has changed his body,’ I went on. ‘For a time you will not see him. He is... there’ – I pointed upward – ’where he can watch you. You cannot see him. But he can see you. Fear the Law.”

— H. G. Wells

322. “I did not feel then that I was lonely, that I had come out from the world into a desolate place. I appreciated my loss of sympathy, but I put it down to the general inanity of things.”

— H. G. Wells

323. “What a huge inaccessible lumber-room of thought and experience we amounted to, I thought; how much we are, how little we transmit.”

— H. G. Wells

324. “Because this island is full of inimical phenomena.”

— H. G. Wells

325. “His studies were pursued but never effectually overtaken.”

— H. G. Wells

326. “Since the passing of Victoria the Great there had been an accumulating uneasiness in the national life. It was as if some compact and dignified paper-weight had been lifted from people’s ideas, and as if at once they had begun to blow about anyhow.”

— H. G. Wells

327. “In our growing science of hypnotism we find the promise of a possibility of replacing old inherent instincts by new suggestions, grafting upon or replacing the inherited fixed ideas. 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

328. “It isn’t a natural thing to keep on worrying about the morality of one’s material prosperity. These are proclivities superinduced by modern conditions of the conscience. There is a natural resistance in every healthy human being to such distressful heart-searchings.”

— H. G. Wells

329. “To the prophetic mind all history is and will continue to be a prelude. The prophetic type will steadfastly refuse to see the world as a museum; it will insist that here is a stage set for a drama that perpetually begins.”

— H. G. Wells

330. “In politics, strangely enough, the best way to play your cards is to lay them face upwards on the table.”

— H. G. Wells

331. “After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.”

— H. G. Wells

332. “The new century will see changes that will dwarf those of the last.”

— H. G. Wells

333. “It seems to me that I am more to the Left than you, Mr Stalin.”

— H. G. Wells

334. “The red tongues that went licking up my heap of wood were an altogether new and strange thing to Weena.”

— H. G. Wells

335. “For fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shopkeeper in Fishbourne. Years they were in which every day was tedious, and when they were gone it was as if they had gone in a flash.”

— H. G. Wells

336. “What’s it all for, Prendick? Are we bubbles blown by a baby?”

— H. G. Wells

337. “I felt amazingly confident, – it’s not particularly pleasant recalling that I was an ass.”

— H. G. Wells

338. “This is a mood, however, that comes to me now, I thank God, more rarely. I have withdrawn myself from the confusion of cities and multitudes, and spend my days surrounded by wise books, – bright windows in this life of ours, lit by the shining souls of men.”

— H. G. Wells

339. “Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods. I do not know how far my experience is common. At times I suffer 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.”

— H. G. Wells

340. “It was not the first time that conscience has turned against the methods of research.”

— H. G. Wells

341. “What a wonderfully complex thing! this simple seeming unity – the self!”

— H. G. Wells

342. “Most of the social and political ills from which you suffer are under your control, given only the will and courage to change them. You can live in another and a wiser fashion if you choose to think it out and work it out. You are not awake to your own power.”

— H. G. Wells

343. “I went to a box room at the top of the house and locked myself in, in order to be alone with my aching miseries.”

— H. G. Wells

344. “IBM is helping to greatly advance and expedite quality sampling while providing our project investigators peace of mind that the information they are gathering is securely stored and protected.”

— H. G. Wells

345. “We want to get rid of the militarist not simply because he hurts and kills, but because he is an intolerable thick-voiced blockhead who stands hectoring and blustering in our way of achievement.”

— H. G. Wells

346. “There it 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.”

— H. G. Wells

347. “One may as well starve one’s body out of a place as to starve one’s soul in one.”

— H. G. Wells

348. “Beauty doesn’t make happiness; it only comes to the happy.”

— H. G. Wells

349. “A douche of spray blinded my brother for a moment.”

— H. G. Wells

350. “For all my desire to be interesting, I have to confess that for most things and people I don’t give a damn.”

— H. G. Wells