H. G. Wells - Time Quotes

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He, I know—for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made—thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end.

H. G. Wells
"It's against reason?" said Filby. "What reason?" said the Time Traveler.

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
Time ends. That is the lesson of the "big bang." It is also the lesson of the black hole.

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
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
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
By this time I was no longer very much terrified or very miserable. I had, as it were, passed the limit of terror and despair. I felt now that my life was practically lost, and that persuasion made me capable of daring anything

H. G. Wells
Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say: 'This time I will burn out all the animal; this time I will make a rational creature of my own!' After all, what is ten years? Men have been a hundred thousand in the making.

H. G. Wells
They may fight against greatness in us who are the children of men, but can they conquer? Even if they should destroy us every one, what then? Would it save them? No! For greatness is abroad, not only in us, not only in the Food, but in the purpose of all things! It is in the nature of all things, it is part of space and time. To grow and still to grow, from first to last that is Being, that is the law of life. What other law can there be?

H. G. Wells
But there are times when the little cloud spreads, until it obscures the sky. And those times I look around at my fellow men and I am reminded of some likeness of the beast-people, and I feel as though the animal is surging up in them. And I know they are neither wholly animal nor holy man, but an unstable combination of both.

H. G. Wells
"By Heaven, Kemp, you don't know what rage is! To have worked for years, to have planned and plotted, and then to get some fumbling purblind idiot messing across your course! Every conceivable sort of silly creature that has ever been created has been sent to cross me. "If I have much more of it, I shall go wild—I shall start mowing 'em. "As it is, they've made things a thousand times more difficult." "No doubt it's exasperating," said Kemp, dryly.

H. G. Wells
Oswald Cabal: Rest enough for the individual man, too much and too soon, and we call it death. But for Man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First, this little planet and its winds and ways. And then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him, and, at last, out across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all the depths of space, and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning...

H. G. Wells
At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all.

H. G. Wells
How far can we anticipate the habitations and ways, the usages and adventures, the mighty employments, the ever increasing knowledge and power of the days to come? No more than a child with its scribbling paper and its box of bricks can picture or model the undertakings of its adult years. Our battle is with cruelties and frustrations, stupid, heavy and hateful things from which we shall escape at last, less like victors conquering a world than like sleepers awaking from a nightmare in the dawn.... A time will come when men will sit with history before them or with some old newspaper before them and ask incredulously,"Was there ever such a world?"

H. G. Wells
After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.

H. G. Wells
In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.

H. G. Wells
We are always getting away from the present moment. Our mental existence, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave.

H. G. Wells
Every time Europe looks across the Atlantic to see the American Eagle, it observes only the rear end of an ostrich.

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

H. G. Wells
A time when all such good things will be for all men may be coming more nearly than we think. Each one who believes that brings the good time nearer; each heart that fails delays it.

H. G. Wells
Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods. I do not know how far my experience is common. At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all. This feeling was very strong upon me that night. Here was another side to my dream.

H. G. Wells
The whole human memory can be, and probably in a short time will be, made accessible to every individual.

H. G. Wells
There was a time when I believed in the story and the scheme of salvation, so far as I could understand it, just as I believed there was a Devil... Suddenly the light broke through to me and I knew this God was a lie... For indeed it is a silly story, and each generation nowadays swallows it with greater difficulty... Why do people go on pretending about this Christianity?

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
Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use. It is time she held her hand.

H. G. Wells
There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.

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
Should we be prepared to see someday a new structure for the foundations of physics that does away with time? In Paul Davies

H. G. Wells
It's against reason," said Filby. "What reason?" said the Time Traveller.

H. G. Wells