Top 450 H. G. Wells Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Security sets a premium on feebleness.”

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

303. “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

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

— 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. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

311. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

314. “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

315. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

320. “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

321. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

329. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

338. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

340. “There is very little deliberate wickedness in the world. The stupidity of our selfishness gives much the same results indeed, but in the ethical laboratory it shows a different nature.”

— H. G. Wells

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

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

— H. G. Wells

344. “We are always getting away from the present moment.”

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

346. “Things have been, says the legal mind, and so we are here. The creative mind says we are here because things have yet to be.”

— H. G. Wells

347. “An immense and ever-increasing wealth of knowledge is scattered about the world today; knowledge that would probably suffice to solve all the mighty difficulties of our age, but it is dispersed and unorganized. We need a sort of mental clearing house for the mind: a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared.”

— H. G. Wells

348. “Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real existence?” Filby became pensive. “Clearly,” the Time Traveller proceeded, “any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thickness, and – Duration.”

— H. G. Wells

349. “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

350. “There is no liberty, save wisdom and self-control. Liberty is within – not without. It is each man’s own affair.”

— H. G. Wells