H. G. Wells Quotes

307 Sourced Quotes

That is the only way I ever heard of true research going. I asked a question, devised some method of obtaining an answer, and got — a fresh question. Was this possible or that possible? You cannot imagine what this means to an investigator, what an intellectual passion grows upon him! You cannot imagine the strange, colourless delight of these intellectual desires!

H. G. Wells
The uglier a man's legs are, the better he plays golf. It's almost a law.

H. G. Wells
Every citizen knows his place. He is born to that place, and the elaborate discipline of training and education and surgery he undergoes fits him at last so completely to it that he has neither ideas nor organs for any purpose beyond it.

H. G. Wells
Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

H. G. Wells
I was too restless to watch long; I am too Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours—that is another matter.

H. G. Wells
"Pull yourself together," said the Voice, "for you have to do the job I've chosen for you." Mr. Marvel blew out his cheeks, and his eyes were round. "I've chosen you," said the Voice. "You are the only man except some of those fools down there, who knows there is such a thing as an invisible man. You have to be my helper. Help me—and I will do great things for you. An invisible man is a man of power."

H. G. Wells
A biography should be a dissection and demonstration of how a particular human being was made and worked.

H. G. Wells
The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is or has been is but the twilight of the dawn.

H. G. Wells
Oswald Cabal: Dragging out life to the last possible second is not living to the best effect. The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat. The best of life, Passworthy, lies nearest to the edge of death.

H. G. Wells
An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.

H. G. Wells
Alone— it is wonderful how little a man can do alone! To rob a little, to hurt a little, and there is the end.

H. G. Wells
Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life.

H. G. Wells
[A novel by Henry James] is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string.

H. G. Wells
If his thinking has been sound, then this world is at the end of its tether. The end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded.

H. G. Wells
Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough—as most wrong theories are!

H. G. Wells
"Why!" said Huxter, suddenly, "that's not a man at all. It's just empty clothes. Look! You can see down his collar and the linings of his clothes. I could put my arm—" He extended his hand; it seemed to meet something in mid-air, and he drew it back with a sharp exclamation. "I wish you'd keep your fingers out of my eye," said the aerial voice, in a tone of savage expostulation. "The fact is, I'm all here: head, hands, legs, and all the rest of it, but it happens I'm invisible. It's a confounded nuisance, but I am. That's no reason why I should be poked to pieces by every stupid bumpkin in Iping, is it?"

H. G. Wells
About two-thirds of the face of Marx is beard, a vast solemn wooly uneventful beard that must have made all normal exercise impossible. It is not the sort of beard that happens to a man, it is a beard cultivated, cherished, and thrust patriarchally upon the world.

H. G. Wells
Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.

H. G. Wells
Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.

H. G. Wells
We do not want dictators, we do not want oligarchic parties or class rule, we want a widespread world intelligence conscious of itself. To work out a way to that world brain organization is therefore our primary need in this age of imperative construction.

H. G. Wells
It is only now and then, in a jungle, or amidst the towering white menace of a burnt or burning Australian forest, that Nature strips the moral veils from vegetation and we apprehend its stark ferocity.

H. G. Wells
We were not making war against Germany, we were being ordered about in the King's war with Germany.

H. G. Wells
Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence began in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau - and for what? It was the wantonness that stirred me.

H. G. Wells
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
Once the command of the air is obtained by one of the contending armies, the war becomes a conflict between a seeing host and one that is blind.

H. G. Wells
The New Deal is plainly an attempt to achieve a working socialism and avert a social collapse in America; it is extraordinarily parallel to the successive "policies" and "Plans" of the Russian experiment. Americans shirk the word "socialism", but what else can one call it?

H. G. Wells
I am for world-control of production and of trade and transport, for a world coinage, and the confederation of mankind. I am for the super-State…

H. G. Wells
Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say: 'This time I will burn out all the animal; this time I will make a rational creature of my own!' After all, what is ten years? Men have been a hundred thousand in the making.

H. G. Wells
By this time I was no longer very much terrified or very miserable. I had, as it were, passed the limit of terror and despair. I felt now that my life was practically lost, and that persuasion made me capable of daring anything

H. G. Wells
They may fight against greatness in us who are the children of men, but can they conquer? Even if they should destroy us every one, what then? Would it save them? No! For greatness is abroad, not only in us, not only in the Food, but in the purpose of all things! It is in the nature of all things, it is part of space and time. To grow and still to grow, from first to last that is Being, that is the law of life. What other law can there be?

H. G. Wells