Top 450 H. G. Wells Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Sailors ought never to go to church. They ought to go to hell, where it is much more comfortable.”

— H. G. Wells

352. “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

353. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

355. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

357. “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

358. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

372. “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

373. “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

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374. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

376. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

378. “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

379. “Life is two things. Life is morality – life is adventure. Squire and master. Adventure rules, and morality looks up the trains in the Bradshaw. Morality tells you what is right, and adventure moves you. If morality means anything it means keeping bounds, respecting implications, respecting implicit bounds. If individuality means anything it means breaking bounds – adventure.”

— H. G. Wells

380. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

382. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

389. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

392. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

395. “Educate the Russian or the American or the Englishman or the Irishman or Frenchman or any real northern European except German, and you get the Anarchist, that is to say the man who dreams of order without organisation – of something beyond organisation...”

— 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. “Oh God, is there ever to be any age of happiness? Is there never to be any rest?”

— H. G. Wells

398. “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

399. “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

400. “The stranger swore briefly but vividly.”

— H. G. Wells