H. G. Wells Quotes

307 Sourced Quotes

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
There are no imports [into the world] but meteorites, and no exports at all.

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

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

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

H. G. Wells
A little while ago we thought of the atoms as we thought of bricks, as solid building material, as substantial matter, as unit masses of lifeless stuff, and behold! these bricks are boxes, treasure boxes, boxes full of the intensest force.

H. G. Wells
In the middle years of the nineteenth century there first became abundant in this strange world of ours a class of men, men tending for the most part to become elderly, who are called, and who are very properly called, but who dislike extremely to be called--"Scientists.

H. G. Wells
The Athenian democracy suffered much from that narrowness of patriotism which is the ruin of all nations.

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

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

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

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
War is a curtain of dense black fabric across all the hopes and kindliness of mankind. Yet always it has let through some gleams of light, and not--I am not dreaming--it grows threadbare, and here and there and at a thousand points the light is breaking through.

H. G. Wells
It had occurred towards midnight of the 12th; and the spectroscope, to which he had at once resorted, indicated a mass of flaming gas, chiefly hydrogen, moving with an enormous velocity towards this earth.

H. G. Wells