H. G. Wells Quotes

307 Sourced Quotes

So utterly at variance is Destiny with all the little plans of men.

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
In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen rampart and stood upon its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was below me. A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it, huge mounds of material and strange shelter places. And scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians—dead!—slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.

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
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
I hate and despise a shrewish suspicion of foreigners and foreign ways; a man who can look me in the face, laugh with me, speak truth and deal fairly, is my brother, though his skin is as black as ink or as yellow as an evening primrose.

H. G. Wells
Leaders I feel should guide as far as they can—and then vanish. Their ashes should not choke the fire they have lit.

H. G. Wells
Heresies are experiments in man's unsatisfied search for truth.

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
Man is an imperfect animal and never quite trustworthy in the dark.

H. G. Wells
And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races? How will it deal with the black? how will it deal with the yellow man? how will it tackle that alleged termite in the civilized woodwork, the Jew? Certainly not as races at all. [...] And the Jew also it will treat as any other man. It is said that the Jew is incurably a parasite on the apparatus of credit. If there are parasites on the apparatus of credit, that is a reason for the legislative cleaning of the apparatus of credit, but it is no reason for the special treatment of the Jew. If the Jew has a certain incurable tendency to social parasitism, and we make social parasitism impossible, we shall abolish the Jew, and if he has not, there is no need to abolish the Jew.

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
Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.

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

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
Most striking, perhaps, in their general appearance was the disproportion between the legs of these creatures and the length of their bodies; and yet — so relative is our idea of grace — my eye became habituated to their forms, and at last I even fell in with their persuasion that my own long thighs were ungainly.

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
The motive that will conquer cancer will not be pity nor horror; it will be curiosity to know how and why. And the desire for service, said Lord Tamar. As the justification of that curiosity, said Mr. Sempack, but not as a motive. Pity never made a good doctor, love never made a good poet. Desire for service never made a discovery.

H. G. Wells
"We were making the future," he said, "and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it is!"

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
The Boss: You are not mechanics, you are warriors. You have been trained, not to think, but to do.

H. G. Wells
No rational mind can question the invincible nature of the evolutionary case.

H. G. Wells
Time is nature's way to keep everything from happening at once.

H. G. Wells
With wine and food, the confidence of my own table, and the necessity of reassuring my wife, I grew by insensible degrees courageous and secure.

H. G. Wells