H. G. Wells Quotes

307 Sourced Quotes

Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance.

H. G. Wells
Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real existence?

H. G. Wells
Hairy or grisly, with a big face like a mask, great brow ridges and no forehead, clutching an enormous flint, and running like a baboon with his head forward, and not, like a man, with his head up, he must have been a fearsome creature for our forefathers to come upon.

H. G. Wells
The history of India for many centuries had been happier, less fierce, and more dreamlike than any other history. In these favorable conditions, they built a character - meditative and peaceful and a nation of philosophers such as could nowhere have existed except in India.

H. G. Wells
Man... can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way.

H. G. Wells
Men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise.

H. G. Wells
In a sense scientific research is a triumph over natural instinct, over that mean instinct that makes men secretive, that makes a man keep knowledge to himself and use it slyly to his own advantage.

H. G. Wells
It is our ignorance of the future and our persuasion that that ignorance is absolutely incurable that alone gives the past its enormous predominance in our thoughts.

H. G. Wells
Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart.

H. G. Wells
You can no more know about the future, I was recently assured by a friend, than you can know which way a kitten will jump next.

H. G. Wells
When the mind grapples with a great and intricate problem, it makes its advances step by step, with but little realization of the gains it has made, until suddenly, with an effect of abrupt illumination, it realizes its victory.

H. G. Wells
Facts are the raw materials and not the substance of science.

H. G. Wells
Scientific truth is the remotest of mistresses; She hides in strange places, she is attained by tortuous and laborious roads, but she is always there! Win to her and she will not fail you; she is yours and mankind's forever. She is reality, the one reality I have found in this strange disorder of existence.

H. G. Wells
Socialism is the preparation for that higher Anarchism; painfully, laboriously we mean to destroy false ideas of property and self, eliminate unjust laws and poisonous and hateful suggestions and prejudices, create a system of social right-dealing and a tradition of right-feeling and action. Socialism is the schoolroom of true and noble Anarchism, wherein by training and restraint we shall make free men.

H. G. Wells
Until a scientific theory yields confident forecasts you know it is unsound and tentative; it is mere theorizing, as evanescent as art talk or the phantoms politicians talk about.

H. G. Wells
Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write.

H. G. Wells
You know of course that a mathematical line, a line of thickness nil, has no real existence. They taught you that? Neither has a mathematical plane. These things are mere abstractions.

H. G. Wells
He had ideas about everything. He could no more help having ideas about everything than a dog can resist smelling at your heels.

H. G. Wells
It's [the moon] dead - dead! Vast extinct volcanoes, lava wildernesses, tumbled wastes of snow, or frozen carbonic acid, or frozen air, and everywhere landslip seams and cracks and gulfs. Nothing happens. Men have watched this planet systematically with telescopes for over two hundred years. How much change do you think they have seen? None.

H. G. Wells
Behind the adventurer, the speculator, comes that scavenger of adventurers, the statistician.

H. G. Wells
We crawled through stony ravines - amidst fungi that ripped like thin bladders at our thrust, emitting a watery humour, over a perfect pavement of things like puffballs, and beneath intermingable thickets of scrub. And ever more hopelessly our eyes sought for our abandoned sphere.

H. G. Wells
Let us get together with other people of our sort and make over the world into a great world-civilization that will enable us to realize the promises and avoid the dangers of this new time.

H. G. Wells
If we do not end war - war will end us. Everybody says that, millions of people believe it, and nobody does anything.

H. G. Wells
The movement of the last hundred years is all in favor of the statistician.

H. G. Wells
I came out for exercise, gentle exercise, and to notice the scenery and to botanise. And no sooner do I get on that accursed machine than off I go hammer and tongs; I never look to right or left, never notice a flower, never see a view - get hot, juicy, red - like a grilled chop. Get me on that machine and I have to go. I go scorching along the road, and cursing aloud at myself for doing it.

H. G. Wells
I saw a gray-haired man a figure of hale age, sitting at a desk and writing.

H. G. Wells
Those who have only seen the starry sky from the earth cannot imagine its appearance when the vague half-luminous veil of our air has been withdrawn. The stars we see on earth are the mere scattered survivors that penetrate our misty atmosphere.

H. G. Wells
I do not propose to add anything to what has already been written concerning the loss of the "Lady Vain."

H. G. Wells
He had one peculiar weakness; he had faced death in many forms but he had never faced a dentist. The thought of dentists gave him just the same sick horror as the thought of invasion.

H. G. Wells
The fertilising conflict of individualities is the ultimate meaning of the personal life.

H. G. Wells