H. G. Wells Quotes

307 Sourced Quotes

Fools make researches and wise men exploit them—that is our earthly way of dealing with the question, and we thank Heaven for an assumed abundance of financially impotent and sufficiently ingenious fools.

H. G. Wells
What, unless biological science is a mass of errors, is the cause of human intelligence and vigour? Hardship and freedom: conditions under which the active, strong, and subtle survive and the weaker go to the wall.

H. G. Wells
To ride a bicycle properly is very like a love affair-chiefly it is a matter of faith. Believe you do it, and the thing is done; doubt, and, for the life of you, you cannot.

H. G. Wells
Spectrum analysis of the black powder points unmistakably to the presence of an unknown element with a brilliant group of three lines in the green, and it is possible that it combines with argon to form a compound which acts at once with deadly effect upon some constituent in the blood.

H. G. Wells
I often think we do not take this business of photography in a sufficiently serious spirit. Issuing a photograph is like marriage: you can only undo the mischief with infinite woe...

H. G. Wells
There will be a time when the day will be as long as a year is now, and the cooling sun, shorn of its beams, will hang motionless in the heavens.

H. G. Wells
The true strength of rulers and empires lies not in armies or emotions, but in the belief of men that they are inflexibly open and truthful and legal. As soon as a government departs from that standard it ceases to be anything more than 'the gang in possession,' and its days are numbered.

H. G. Wells
Our earth is a spinning globe. Vast though it seems to us, it is a mere speck of matter in the greater vastness of space.

H. G. Wells
Could anything be more dead, more mute and inexpressive to the inexpert eye than the ochreous fragments of bone and the fractured lumps of flint that constitute the first traces of something human in the world?

H. G. Wells
We have learned now that we cannot regard this planet as being fenced in and a secure abiding place for Man we can never anticipate the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space.

H. G. Wells
I don't think you fully appreciate the importance of Illusion in life, the Essential Nature of Lies and Deception of the body politic.

H. G. Wells
Few people without a training in science can realise the huge isolation of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets, its dust of planetoids, and its impalpable comets, swims in a vacant immensity that almost defeats the imagination.

H. G. Wells
And all this time the lunar plants were growing around us, higher and denser and more entangled, every moment thicker and taller, spiked plants, green cactus masses, fungi, fleshy and lichenous things, strangest radiate and sinuous shapes.

H. G. Wells
It is usual to assume that the sun will go on cooling steadily in the future. But people... forget that the planets must ultimately fall back one by one into the parent body. As these catastrophes occur, the sun will blaze with renewed energy.

H. G. Wells
The army ages men sooner than the law and philosophy; it exposes them more freely to germs, which undermine and destroy, and it shelters them more completely from thought, which stimulates and preserves.

H. G. Wells
The whole difference of modern scientific research from that of the Middle Ages, the secret of its immense success, lies in its collective character, in the fact that every fruitful experiment is published, every new discovery of relationships explained.

H. G. Wells
For the true scientific method is this: To trust no statements without verification, to test all things as rigorously as possible, to keep no secrets, to attempt no monopolies, to give out one's best modestly and plainly, serving no other end but knowledge.

H. G. Wells
Meteorology constantly and persistently aims at prophecy, and it will never stand in a place of honor until it can certainly foretell.

H. G. Wells
Anthropology has been compared to a great region, marked out indeed as within the sphere of influence of science, but unsettled and for the most part unsubdued. Like all such hinterland sciences, it is a happy hunting-ground for adventurers.

H. G. Wells
That, science said, would be all. The green clouds would whirl and vanish, and there might be thunderstorms. But through the attenuated wisps of comet shine, the old sky, the old stars, would reappear, and all would be as it had been before.

H. G. Wells
The popular idea of scientific investigation is a vehement, aimless collection of little facts, collected as a bower bird collects shells and pebbles, in methodical little rows, and out of this process, in some manner unknown to the popular mind, certain conjuring tricks - the celebrated "wonders of science" - in a sort of accidental way emerge.

H. G. Wells
Money means in a thousand minds a thousand subtly different, roughly similar, systems of images, associations, suggestions and impulses.

H. G. Wells
I am not deeply versed in physical science, but there are certain things about water that fill me with wonder and amaze.

H. G. Wells
No man can be a good teacher when his subject becomes inexplicable.

H. G. Wells
Marriage isn't what it was. It's become a different thing because women have become human beings.

H. G. Wells
I saw great and splendid architecture rising about me, more massive than any buildings of our own time, and yet, as it seemed, built of glimmer and mist.

H. G. Wells
On the 14th of October 1899 this [Cavorite an artificial mineral that possesses anti-gravity properties] incredible substance was made!

H. G. Wells
I see knowledge increasing and human power increasing. I see ever-increasing possibilities before life, And I see no limits set to it at all, Existence impresses me as a perpetual dawn. Our lives, as I apprehend, are great in expectations.

H. G. Wells
There will be little drudgery in this better ordered world. Natural power harnessed in machines will be the general drudge. What drudgery is inevitable will be done as a service and duty for a few years or months out of each life; it will not consume nor degrade the whole life of anyone.

H. G. Wells
Satan delights equally in statistics and in quoting scripture....

H. G. Wells