Top 450 H. G. Wells Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “I fell indeed into a morbid state, deep and enduring, and alien to fear, which has left permanent scars upon my mind. I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world when I saw it suffering the painful disorder of this island. A.”

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

354. “A federation of all humanity, together with a sufficient measure of social justice, to ensure health, education, and a rough equality of opportunity to most of the children born into the world, would mean such a release and increase of human energy as to open a new phase in human history.”

— H. G. Wells

355. “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

356. “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

357. “For instance, here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another at fifteen, another at seventeen, another at twenty-three, and so on. All these are evidently sections, as it were, Three Dimensional representations of his Four-Dimensional being, which is a fixed and unalterable thing.”

— H. G. Wells

358. “Could it be possible, I thought, that such a thing as the vivisection of men was carried on here? The question shot like lightning across a tumultuous sky; and suddenly the clouded horror of my mind condensed into a vivid realisation of my own danger.”

— H. G. Wells

359. “The truly brave man is not the man who does not feel fear but the man who overcomes it.”

— H. G. Wells

360. “The sojers’ll stop ’em,” said a woman beside me, doubtfully. A haziness rose over the treetops.”

— H. G. Wells

361. “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

362. “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

363. “What did it matter, since it was unreality, all of it, the pain and desire, the beginning and the end? There was no reality except this solitary road, this quite solitary road, along which on went rather puzzled, rather tired...”

— H. G. Wells

364. “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

365. “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

366. “I feel to think, he thinks to feel. It is I and my kind that have the wider range, because we can be impersonal as well as personal. We can escape ourselves.”

— H. G. Wells

367. “Like a committee in a thieves’ kitchen when someone has casually mentioned the law.”

— H. G. Wells

368. “You know that great pause that comes upon things before the dusk, even the breeze stops in the trees. To me there is always an air of expectation about that evening stillness.”

— H. G. Wells

369. “You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist that you wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic, clumsy and unreliable – but teach him, inoculate him with chess.”

— H. G. Wells

370. “I perceived that I was hungry, and prepared to clamber out of the hammock, which, very politely anticipating my intention, twisted round and deposited me upon all-fours on the floor.”

— H. G. Wells

371. “And this spreading usurpation of the world was so dexterously performed – a proteus – hundreds of banks, companies, syndicates, masked the Council’s operations – that it was already far advanced before common men suspected the tyranny that had come. The.”

— H. G. Wells

372. “After telephone, kinematograph and phonograph had replaced newspaper, book schoolmaster and letter, to live outside the range of the electric cables was to live an isolated savage.”

— H. G. Wells

373. “Religions are such stuff as dreams are made of.”

— H. G. Wells

374. “It is the going out from oneself that is love and not the accident of its return. It is the expedition, whether it fail or succeed.”

— H. G. Wells

375. “There is no liberty save wisdom and self-control.”

— H. G. Wells

376. “The establishment of the world community will surely exact a price – and who can tell what that price may be? – in toil, suffering and blood.”

— H. G. Wells

377. “I ceased even to breathe. It was ridiculous, of course, but you know that ghost-story feeling.”

— H. G. Wells

378. “Go to the devil!” said the stranger in a tremendous voice, and “Shut that door after you.” So that brief interview terminated.”

— H. G. Wells

379. “It was a red-flannel chest-protector, one of those large quasi-hygienic objects that with pills and medicines take the place of beneficial relics and images among the Protestant peoples of Christendom.”

— H. G. Wells

380. “You can’t see beauty with miserable eyes.”

— H. G. Wells

381. “A real value of a talk is not how it goes but what it leaves in your memory, which is one reason perhaps why dialogues in books are always so boring to read.”

— H. G. Wells

382. “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

383. “They despite and hate the government more and more, but they don’t know how to set about changing it. The country is dying for some sort of lead, and so far all it is getting is a crowd of fresh professional leaders. Who never get anywhere. Who do not seem to be aiming anywhere. We are living in a world of jaded politics. Poverty increases, prices rise, unemployment spreads, mines, factories stagnate, and nothing is done.”

— H. G. Wells

384. “It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men’s lives should not pay with their own.”

— H. G. Wells

385. “He was inordinately proud of England and he abused her incessantly.”

— H. G. Wells

386. “Modern war, modern international hostility is, I believe, possible only through the stupid illiteracy of the mass of men and the conceit and intellectual indolence of rulers and those who feed the public mind.”

— H. G. Wells

387. “And with that the Time Traveller began his story as I have set it forth. He sat back in his chair at first, and spoke like a weary man. Afterwards he got more animated.”

— H. G. Wells

388. “Our species may yet end its strange eventful history as just the last, the cleverest of the great apes. The great ape that was clever – but not clever enough. It could escape from most things but not from its own mental confusion.”

— H. G. Wells

389. “Men who think in lifetimes are of little use to statesmanship.”

— H. G. Wells

390. “It continued to swear with that breadth and variety that distinguishes the swearing of a cultivated man.”

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

392. “A certain elementary training in statistical method is becoming as necessary for everyone living in this world of today as reading and writing.”

— H. G. Wells

393. “But wait a moment. Can an instantaneous cube exist?”

— H. G. Wells

394. “I did not feel a bit sorry for my father. He seemed to me to be the victim of his own foolish sentimentality.”

— H. G. Wells

395. “And even it seemed that I too was not a reasonable creature, but only an animal tormented with some strange disorder in its brain which sent it to wander alone, like a sheep stricken with gid.”

— H. G. Wells

396. “Then suddenly the humour of the situation came into my mind: the thought of the years I had spent in study and toil to get into the future age, and now my passion of anxiety to get out of it. I had made myself the most complicated and the most hopeless trap that ever a man devised. Although it was at my own expense, I could not help myself. I laughed aloud.”

— H. G. Wells

397. “The third peculiarity of aerial warfare was that it was at once enormously destructive and entirely indecisive.”

— H. G. Wells

398. “It doesn’t follow that a nasty habit of mind is any less nasty because it’s ancestral. It doesn’t follow you can’t cure it. Why scratch fleas for ever? Gambling, speculation, is a social disease. It’s as natural and desirable as – syphilis...”

— H. G. Wells

399. “But there are times when the little cloud spreads, until it obscures the sky. And those times I look around at my fellow men and I am reminded of some likeness of the beast-people, and I feel as though the animal is surging up in them. And I know they are neither wholly animal nor holy man, but an unstable combination of both.”

— H. G. Wells

400. “The present writer is a prophet by use and wont. He is more interested in to-morrow than he is in to-day, and the past is just material for future guessing. “Think of the men who have walked here!” said a tourist in the Roman Coliseum. It was a Futurist mind that answered: “Think of the men who will.”

— H. G. Wells