John Wyndham Quotes

26 Sourced Quotes

There was often a great deal of grown-up fuss that seemed disproportionate to causes.

John Wyndham
I do refuse to accept a bad theory simply on the grounds that there is not a better [one].

John Wyndham
Why was I condemned to live in a democracy where every fool's vote is equal to a sensible man's?

John Wyndham
I don't think it had ever occurred to me that man's supremacy is not primarily due to his brain, as most of the books would have one think. It is due to the brain's capacity to make use of the information conveyed to it by a narrow band of visible light rays. His civilization, all that he had achieved or might achieve, hung upon his ability to perceive that range of vibrations from red to violet. Without that, he was lost.

John Wyndham
Why should I? I've done nothing to be ashamed of. I am not ashamed — I am only beaten.

John Wyndham
It's humiliating to be dependent, anyway, but it's still a poorer pass to have no one to depend on.

John Wyndham
Knowing makes all the difference... It's the difference between just trying to keep alive, and having something to live for

John Wyndham
But, as I understand it, your God is a universal God; He is God on all suns and all planets. Surely, then, He must have universal form? Would it not be a staggering vanity to imagine that He can manifest Himself only in the form that is appropriate to this particular, not very important planet?

John Wyndham
If you run away from a thing just because you don't like it, you don't like what you find either.

John Wyndham
I shall pray to God to send charity to this hideous world, and sympathy for the weak, and love for the unhappy and unfortunate. I shall ask Him if is indeed His will that a child should suffer and its soul be damned for a little blemish on the body.... And I shall pray Him, too, that the hearts of the self-righteous may be broken.

John Wyndham
The essential quality of life is living, the essential quality of living is change; change is evolution; and we are part of it.

John Wyndham
I'm a reliable witness, you're a reliable witness, practically all God's children are reliable witnesses in their own estimation — which makes it funny how such different ideas of the same affair get about.

John Wyndham
If you want to keep alive in the jungle, you must live as the jungle does.

John Wyndham
When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.

John Wyndham
Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a precarious existence.

John Wyndham
Some quotations," said Zellaby, "are greatly improved by lack of context.

John Wyndham
It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that "it can't happen here" — that one's own time and place is beyond cataclysm.

John Wyndham
And we danced, on the brink of an unknown future, to an echo from a vanished past.

John Wyndham
Knowledge is simply a kind of fuel; it needs the motor of understanding to convert it into power.

John Wyndham
The simple rely on a bolstering mass of maxim and precept, so do the timid, so do the mentally lazy – and so do all of us, more than we imagine.

John Wyndham
I suppose a book is still a book, even if no one but the author and his wife reads it.

John Wyndham
There must, I think, be a great many people who go around just longing to be baffled.

John Wyndham
But not she. Her eternity is an article of her faith. Great wars and disasters can ebb and flow, races rise and fall, empires wither with suffering and death, but these are superficialities: she, woman, is perpetual, essential; she will go on for ever.

John Wyndham
There is an inability to sustain the tragic mood, a phoenix quality of the mind. It may be helpful or harmful, it is just a part of the will to survive—yet, also, it has made it possible for us to engage in one weakening war after another. But it is a necessary part of our mechanism that we should be able to cry only for a time over even an ocean of spilt milk—the spectacular must soon become the commonplace if life is to be supportable.

John Wyndham
Children have a different convention of the fearful until they have been taught the proper things to be shocked at.

John Wyndham
We all have our youthful follies, embarrassing to recall — but people somehow find it hard to dismiss as a youthful folly anything that has happened to be a financial success.

John Wyndham