Top 450 H. G. Wells Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

304. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

306. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

311. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

313. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

315. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

322. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

324. “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

325. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

335. “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

336. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

338. “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

339. “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

340. “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

341. “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

342. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

344. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

346. “Sailors ought never to go to church. They ought to go to hell, where it is much more comfortable.”

— H. G. Wells

347. “I’ve never really planned my life or set out to live. I happened; things happened to me. It’s so with everyone.”

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

349. “Have a good look at the thing. Look at the table too, and satisfy yourselves there is no trickery. I don’t want to waste this model, and then be told I’m a quack.”

— H. G. Wells

350. “In another place was a vast array of idols – Polynesian, Mexican, Grecian, Phoenician, every country on earth I should think. And here, yielding to an irresistible impulse, I wrote my name upon the nose of a steatite monster from South America that particularly took my fancy.”

— H. G. Wells