H. G. Wells - The Time Machine (1895)

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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
I'm afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time traveling. They are excessively unpleasant.

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

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
All the old constellations had gone from the sky, however: that slow movement which is imperceptible in a hundred human lifetimes, had long since rearranged them in unfamiliar groupings.

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

H. G. Wells
It is usual to assume that the sun will go on cooling steadily in the future. But people... forget that the planets must ultimately fall back one by one into the parent body. As these catastrophes occur, the sun will blaze with renewed energy.

H. G. Wells
What, unless biological science is a mass of errors, is the cause of human intelligence and vigour? Hardship and freedom: conditions under which the active, strong, and subtle survive and the weaker go to the wall.

H. G. Wells
Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness.

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
Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough—as most wrong theories are!

H. G. Wells
Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.

H. G. Wells
Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life.

H. G. Wells
This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then comes languor and decay.

H. G. Wells
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
We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity.

H. G. Wells