Top 90 John Wyndham Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Knowledge is simply a kind of fuel; it needs the motor of understanding to convert it into power.”

— John Wyndham

2. “And we danced, on the brink of an unknown future, to an echo from a vanished past.”

— John Wyndham

3. “If you run away from a thing just because you don’t like it, you don’t like what you find either.”

— John Wyndham

4. “Why was I condemned to live in a democracy where every fool’s vote is equal to a sensible man’s?”

— John Wyndham

5. “When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.”

— John Wyndham

6. “Soldiering’ll soon be nothing but wizards and wires.”

— John Wyndham

7. “When I was quite small I would sometimes dream of a city – which was strange, because it began before I even knew what a city was.”

— John Wyndham

8. “Why should I? I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of. I am not ashamed – I am only beaten.”

— John Wyndham

9. “If you want to keep alive in the jungle, you must live as the jungle does.”

— John Wyndham

10. “Find a nice, self sufficient hilltop, and fortify it.”

— John Wyndham

11. “Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a precarious existence.”

— John Wyndham

12. “And so the one in our garden continued its growth peacefully, as did thousands like it in neglected spots all over the world. It was some little time later that the first one picked up its roots and walked.”

— John Wyndham

13. “La vida, en todas sus manifestaciones, es conflicto.”

— John Wyndham

14. “It’s humiliating to be dependent, anyway, but it’s still a poorer pass to have no one to depend on.”

— John Wyndham

15. “The clock is the most scared thing in a hospital.”

— John Wyndham

16. “They haven’t God’s word like they thought: God doesn’t have any last word. If He did He’d be dead. But He isn’t dead; and He changes and grows, like everything else that’s alive.”

— John Wyndham

17. “It must be, I thought, one of the race’s most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that “it can’t happen here” – that one’s own time and place is beyond cataclysm.”

— John Wyndham

18. “In Oppley they’re smart, and in Stouch they’re smarmy, but Midwich folk are just plain barmy.”

— John Wyndham

19. “Reality is relative. Devils, evil spirits, witches and so on became real enough to the people who believed in them. Just as God is to people who believe in Him. When people live their lives by their beliefs objective reality is almost irrelevant.”

— John Wyndham

20. “The Old People brought down Tribulation, and were broken into fragments by it. Your father and his kind are a part of those fragments. They have become history without being aware of it. They are determined still that there is a final form to defend: soon they will attain the stability they strive for, in the only form it is granted – a place among the fossils.”

— John Wyndham

21. “They stamp on any change: they close the way and keep the type fixed because they’ve got the arrogance to think themselves perfect. As they reckon it, they. and only they, are in the true image; very well, then it follows that if the image is true, they themselves must be God: and, being God, they reckon themselves entitled to decree, “thus far, and no farther.” That is their great sin: they try to strangle the life out of Life.”

— John Wyndham

22. “The leader does the planning, but he’s wise enough not to say so. As the changes become necessary, he slips them in as a concession – temporary, of course – to circumstances, but if he’s good, he’s slipping in the right bits for the ultimate shape.”

— John Wyndham

23. “Your work is to survive. Neither his kind, nor his kind of thinking will survive long. They are the crown of creation, they are ambition fulfilled – they have nowhere more to go. But life is change, that is how it differs from the rocks, change is its very nature. Who, then, were the recent lords of creation, that they should expect to remain unchanged?”

— John Wyndham

24. “We’ve got to believe that God is sane, Davie boy. We’d be lost indeed if we didn’t do that.”

— John Wyndham

25. “Children have a different convention of the fearful until they have been taught the proper things to be shocked at.”

— John Wyndham

26. “The humans have a curious force they call ambition. It drives them, and, through them, it drives us. This force which keeps them active, we lack. Perhaps, in time, we machines will acquire it.”

— John Wyndham

27. “But, as I understand it, your God is a universal God; He is God on all suns and all planets. Surely, then, He must have universal form? Would it not be a staggering vanity to imagine that He can manifest Himself only in the form that is appropriate to this particular, not very important planet?”

— John Wyndham

28. “You know, one of the most shocking things about it is to realize how easily we have lost a world that seemed so safe and certain.”

— John Wyndham

29. “The alternative is the sword over your heads,′ he said. ‘I know,’ I agreed unhappily. ‘But that isn’t the way. A sword inside us would be worse.”

— John Wyndham

30. “There is an inability to sustain the tragic mood, a phoenix quality of the mind. It may be helpful or harmful, it is just a part of the will to survive – yet, also, it has made it possible for us to engage in one weakening war after another. But it is a necessary part of our mechanism that we should be able to cry only for a time over even an ocean of spilt milk – the spectacular must soon become the commonplace if life is to be supportable.”

— John Wyndham

31. “Nobody is going to be muddle-headed enough to confuse ignorance with innocence now – it’s too important. Nor is ignorance going to be cute or funny anymore. It is going to be dangerous, very dangerous.”

— John Wyndham

32. “I’m a reliable witness, you’re a reliable witness, practically all God’s children are reliable witnesses in their own estimation – which makes it funny how such different ideas of the same affair get about.”

— John Wyndham

33. “Pretty nearly any stroke of fate can be made to look like a funny coincidence if you try hard enough and wait long enough.”

— John Wyndham

34. “In temperate countries, where man had succeeded in putting most forms of nature save his own under a reasonable degree of restraint, the status of the triffid was thus made quite clear. But in the tropics, particularly in the dense forest areas, they quickly became a scourge.”

— John Wyndham

35. “There is no conception more fallacious than the sense of cosiness implied by “Mother Nature”. Each species must strive to survive, and that it will do, by every means in its power, however foul – unless the instinct to survive is weakened by conflict with another instinct.”

— John Wyndham

36. “The way I came to miss the end of the world – well, the end of the world I had known for close on thirty years – was sheer accident: like a lot of survival, when you come to think of it.”

— John Wyndham

37. “It’s not my fault if I’m not any good at things like that.” “I’ll differ there,” Coker told her. “It’s not only your fault – it’s a self-created fault. Moreover, it’s an affectation to consider yourself too spiritual to understand anything mechanical. It is a petty and a very silly form of vanity. Everyone starts by knowing nothing about anything, but God gives him – and even her – brains to find out with. Failure to use them is not a virtue to be praised;.”

— John Wyndham

38. “Half the political intelligentsia who talk to a working audience don’t get the value of their stuff across – not so much because they’re over their audience’s heads, as because half the chaps are listening to the voice and not to the words, so they knock a big discount off what they do hear because it’s all a bit fancy, and not like ordinary, normal talk.”

— John Wyndham

39. “All my life I have been surrounded by things I’d rather not know too much about, so I have come to feel that truth made naked without purpose is really a wanton.”

— John Wyndham

40. “But it is an inescapable conclusion that life has to be dynamic and not static. Change is bound to come one way or another.”

— John Wyndham

41. “The simple rely on a bolstering mass of maxim and precept, so do the timid, so do the mentally lazy – and so do all of us, more than we imagine.”

— John Wyndham

42. “You don’t seriously suggest that thet’re talking when they make that rattling noise.”

— John Wyndham

43. “There they sit, with everyone thinking no more of them than they might of a pretty odd lot of cabbages, yet half the time they’re pattering and clattering away at one another. Why? What is it they patter about? That’s what I want to know.’ I.”

— John Wyndham

44. “The living form defies evolution at its peril; if it does not adapt, it will be broken. The idea of completed man is the supreme vanity: the finished image is a sacrilegious myth.”

— John Wyndham

45. “We all have our youthful follies, embarassing to recall – but people somehow find it hard to dismiss as a youthful folly anything that has happened to be a financial success.”

— John Wyndham

46. “We are not shut away into individual cages from which we can reach out only with inadequate words.”

— John Wyndham

47. “My protective coloration isn’t intended to deceive you, my sweet. It is intended to deceive me.”

— John Wyndham

48. “When almost half a lifetime has been spent in one conception of order, reorientation is no five-minute business.”

— John Wyndham

49. “What we do with the product of genius is first of all ram it down to the lowest common denominator and then multiply it by the vulgarest possible fraction. -from “Pawley’s Peepholes.”

— John Wyndham

50. “I was hiding from them even while I moved among them.”

— John Wyndham