H. G. Wells Quotes

307 Sourced Quotes

A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own.

H. G. Wells
Beauty isn't a special inserted sort of thing. It is just life, pure life, life nascent, running clear and strong.

H. G. Wells
Mankind which began in a cave and behind a windbreak will end in the disease-soaked ruins of a slum.

H. G. Wells
If Max [Beaverbrook] gets to Heaven he won't last long. He will be chucked out for trying to pull off a merger between Heaven and Hell…after having secured a controlling interest in key subsidiary companies in both places, of course.

H. G. Wells
The weaving of mankind into one community does not imply the creation of a homogeneous community, but rather the reverse; the welcome and adequate utilization of distinctive quality in an atmosphere of understanding... Communities all to one pattern, like boxes of toy soldiers, are things of the past, rather than of the future.

H. G. Wells
The only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we might have been on the one hand, and the thing we have made and the things we have made of ourselves on the other.

H. G. Wells
To do such a thing would be to transcend magic. And I beheld, unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of all that invisibility might mean to a man—the mystery, the power, the freedom. Drawbacks I saw none. You have only to think! And I, a shabby, poverty-struck, hemmed-in demonstrator, teaching fools in a provincial college, might suddenly become—this.

H. G. Wells
The too perfect security of the Upper-worlders had led them to a slow movement of degeneration, a general dwindling in size, strength, and intelligence.

H. G. Wells
Things that would have made fame of a less clever man seemed tricks in his hands. It is a mistake to do things too easily.

H. G. Wells
Find the thing you want to do most intensely, make sure that's it, and do it with all your might. If you live, well and good. If you die, well and good. Your purpose is done

H. G. Wells
And in the air are no streets, no channels, no point where one can say of an antagonist, "If he wants to reach my capital he must come by here." In the air all directions lead everywhere.

H. G. Wells
The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.

H. G. Wells
We live in a world of unused and misapplied knowledge and skill.

H. G. Wells
The art of ignoring is one of the accomplishments of every well-bred girl, so carefully instilled that at last she can even ignore her own thoughts and her own knowledge.

H. G. Wells
No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.

H. G. Wells
Great and little cannot understand one another. But in every child born of man, Father Redwood, lurks some seed of greatness — waiting for the Food.

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

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

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

H. G. Wells
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
If only I had thought of a Kodak! I could have flashed that glimpse of the Under-world in a second, and examined it at leisure.

H. G. Wells
He had read Shakespeare and found him weak in chemistry.

H. G. Wells
And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers - shriveled now, and brown and flat and brittle - to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of men.

H. G. Wells