Top 450 H. G. Wells Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

353. “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

354. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

364. “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

365. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

367. “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

368. “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

Featured in: Book Quotes

369. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

371. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

379. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

382. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

389. “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

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

— H. G. Wells

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

395. “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

396. “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

397. “The stranger swore briefly but vividly.”

— H. G. Wells

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

— H. G. Wells

399. “Tewler Americanus in particular was irritated by a harsh logic that overrode his dearest belief in his practical isolation, whenever he chose to withdraw himself, from the affairs of the rest of the world. He had escaped from the old world and he hated to feel that he was being drawn back to share a common destiny with the rest of mankind.”

— H. G. Wells

400. “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