H. G. Wells famous quotes
Last updated: Jul 22, 2024
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We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle and mystery.
-- H. G. Wells -
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
-- H. G. Wells -
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We all have our time machines, don't we. Those that take us back are memories...And those that carry us forward, are dreams.
-- H. G. Wells -
Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write!
-- H. G. Wells -
Once the command of the air is obtained by one of the contending armies, the war becomes a conflict between a seeing host and one that is blind.
-- 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 -
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If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it.
-- H. G. Wells -
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
-- H. G. Wells -
I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there.
-- H. G. Wells -
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A federation of all humanity, together with a sufficient measure of social justice, to ensure health, education, and a rough equality of opportunity to most of the children born into the world, would mean such a release and increase of human energy as to open a new phase in human history.
-- 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 -
once you lose yourself, you have two choices: find the person you used to be, or lose that person completely.
-- H. G. Wells -
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There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.
-- H. G. Wells -
It seems to me that I am more to the Left than you, Mr Stalin
-- H. G. Wells -
Life, forever dying to be born afresh, forever young and eager, will presently stand upon this Earth as upon a footstool, and stretch out its realm amidst the stars.
-- H. G. Wells -
I am an historian, I am not a believer, but I must confess as a historian that this penniless preacher from Nazareth is irrevocably the very center of history. Jesus Christ is easily the most dominant figure in all history.
-- H. G. Wells -
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Human society is based on want. Life is based on want. Wild-eyed visionaries may dream of a world without need. Cloud-cuckoo-land. It can't be done.
-- H. G. Wells -
Face this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all.
-- H. G. Wells -
We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century - for several centuries.
-- H. G. Wells -
When she was fifteen if you'd told her that when she was twenty she'd be going to bed with bald-headed men and liking it, she would have thought you very abstract.
-- H. G. Wells -
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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 -
To do such a thing would be to transcend magic. And I beheld, unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of all that invisibility might mean to a man—the mystery, the power, the freedom. Drawbacks I saw none. You have only to think! And I, a shabby, poverty-struck, hemmed-in demonstrator, teaching fools in a provincial college, might suddenly become—this.
-- H. G. Wells -
When a man realizes his littleness, his greatness can appear.
-- H. G. Wells -
Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.
-- H. G. Wells -
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My days I devote to reading and experiments in chemistry, and I spend many of the clear nights in the study of astronomy. There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope.
-- H. G. Wells -
The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice
-- H. G. Wells -
There is no upper limit to what individuals are capable of doing with their minds. There is no age limit that bars them from beginning. There is no obstacle that cannot be overcome if they persist and believe.
-- H. G. Wells -
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In all ages, far back into prehistory, we find human beings have painted and adorned themselves.
-- H. G. Wells -
New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled the humiliating question arises 'Why then are you not taking part in them?
-- H. G. Wells -
He began to realize that you cannot even fight happily with creatures that stand upon a different mental basis to yourself.
-- H. G. Wells -
All men, however highly educated, retain some superstitious inklings.
-- H. G. Wells -
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Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future.
-- H. G. Wells -
We live in reference to past experience and not to future events, however inevitable.
-- H. G. Wells -
Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning.
-- 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 -
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Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.
-- H. G. Wells -
Endless conflicts. Endless misunderstanding. All life is that. Great and little cannot understand one another.
-- 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 -
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What really matters is what you do with what you have.
-- H. G. Wells -
Affliction comes to us, not to make us sad but sober; not to make us sorry but wise.
-- H. G. Wells -
No compulsion in the world is stronger than the urge to edit someone else's document.
-- H. G. Wells -
There is no remorse like the remorse of Chess
-- H. G. Wells -
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It is the system of nationalist individualism that has to go....We are living in the end of the sovereign states....In the great struggle to evoke a Westernized World Socialism, contemporary governments may vanish....Countless people...will hate the new world order....and will die protesting against it.
-- H. G. Wells -
The doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the main teaching of Jesus, is certainly one of the most revolutionary doctrines that ever stirred and changed human thought.
-- H. G. Wells -
Leaders should lead as far as they can and then vanish. Their ashes should not choke the fire they have lit.
-- H. G. Wells -
The uglier a man's legs are, the better he plays golf - it's almost a law.
-- H. G. Wells -
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No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.
-- H. G. Wells -
Sometimes, you have to step outside of the person you've been and remember the person you were meant to be. The person you want to be. The person you are.
-- 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 -
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Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.
-- H. G. Wells -
The path of least resistance is the path of the loser.
-- H. G. Wells -
In politics, strangely enough, the best way to play your cards is to lay them face upwards on the table.
-- H. G. Wells -
And all over the countryside, he knew, on every crest and hill, where once the hedges had interlaced, and cottages, churches, inns, and farmhouses had nestled among their trees, wind wheels similar to those he saw and bearing like vast advertisements, gaunt and distinctive symbols of the new age, cast their whirling shadows and stored incessantly the energy that flowed away incessantly through all the arteries of the city. ... The great circular shapes of complaining wind-wheels blotted out the heavens ...
-- H. G. Wells -
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Will is stronger than fact: it can mold and overcome fact.
-- H. G. Wells -
After your first day of cycling, one dream is inevitable. A memory of motion lingers in the muscles of your legs, and round and round they seem to go. You ride through Dreamland on wonderful dream bicycles that change and grow.
-- H. G. Wells -
The New Deal is plainly an attempt to achieve a working socialism and avert a social collapse in America; it is extraordinarily parallel to the successive 'policies' and 'Plans' of the Russian experiment. Americans shirk the word 'socialism', but what else can one call it?
-- H. G. Wells -
Human history is, in essence, a history of ideas.
-- H. G. Wells -
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Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence began in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau - and for what? It was the wantonness that stirred me.
-- H. G. Wells -
A day will come when beings, now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon Earth as a footstool and laugh, and reach out their hands amidst the stars.
-- H. G. Wells -
A downtrodden class... will never be able to make an effective protest until it achieves solidarity.
-- H. G. Wells -
In all the round world of Utopia there is no meat. There used to be, but now we cannot stand the thought of slaughterhouses. And it is impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig. I can still remember as a boy the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughterhouse.
-- H. G. Wells -
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I had just taken to reading. I had just discovered the art of leaving my body to sit impassive in a crumpled up attitude in a chair or sofa, while I wandered over the hills and far away in novel company and new scenes... My world began to expand very rapidly,... the reading habit had got me securely.
-- H. G. Wells -
One believes in Stephen Dedalus as one believes in few characters in fiction.
-- H. G. Wells -
There's nothing wrong in suffering, if you suffer for a purpose. Our revolution didn't abolish danger or death. It simply made danger and death worthwhile.
-- H. G. Wells -
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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 -
What on earth would a man do with himself, if something did not stand in his way?
-- 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; conditions that put a premium upon the loyal alliance of capable men, upon self-restraint, patience, and decision. And the institution of the family, and the emotions that arise therein, the fierce jealousy, the tenderness for offspring, parental self-devotion, all found their justification and support in the imminent dangers of the young.
-- H. G. Wells -
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It sounds plausible enough tonight, but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.
-- 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 -
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... when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people ... will hate the New World Order and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people.
-- H. G. Wells -
The character of the Open Conspiracy [the movement towards a world collective] will now be plainly displayed. It will have become a great world movement as widespread and evident as socialism or communism. It will largely have taken the place of these movements. It will be more, it will be a world religion.
-- H. G. Wells -
The establishment of the world community will surely exact a price – and who can tell what that price may be? – in toil, suffering and blood.
-- H. G. Wells -
It is only now and then, in a jungle, or amidst the towering white menace of a burnt or burning Australian forest, that Nature strips the moral veils from vegetation and we apprehend its stark ferocity.
-- H. G. Wells -
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The world state must begin; it can only begin, as a propaganda cult, or as a group of propagandist cults, to which men and women must give themselves and their energies, regardless of the consequence to themselves The activities of a cult which sets itself to bring about the world-state would at first be propagandist, they would be intellectual and educational, and only as a sufficient mass of opinion and will had accumulated would they become to a predominant extent politically constructive. Such a cult must direct itself particularly to the teaching of the young.
-- H. G. Wells -
The British Islands are small islands and our people numerically a little people. Their only claim to world importance depends upon their courage and enterprise, and a people who will not stand up to the necessity of air service planned on a world scale, and taking over thousands of aeroplanes and thousands of men from the onset of peace, has no business to pretend anything more than a second rate position in the world. We cannot be both Imperial and mean.
-- H. G. Wells -
Now the most comprehensive conception of this new world is of one politically, socially and economically united To this end a small but increasing body of people in the world set their faces and seek to direct their lives.
-- H. G. Wells -
The passion for playing Chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world
-- H. G. Wells -
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The great body of physical science, a great deal of the essential fact of financial science, and endless social and political problems are only accessible and only thinkable to those who have had a sound training in mathematical analysis, and the time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex worldwide States that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write.
-- H. G. Wells -
It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble.
-- H. G. Wells -
Fools make researches and wise men exploit them.
-- H. G. Wells -
The lawgiver, of all beings, most owes the law allegiance. He of all men should behave as though the law compelled him. But it is the universal weakness of mankind that what we are given to administer we presently imagine we own.
-- H. G. Wells -
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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 all 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 immensities to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deep space, and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning.
-- H. G. Wells -
He spares no resource in telling of his dead inventions... Bare verbs he rarely tolerates. He splits infinitives and fills them up with adverbial stuffing. He presses the passing colloquialism into his service. His vast paragraphis sweat and struggle; the
-- H. G. Wells -
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There comes a moment in the day when you have written your pages in the morning, attended to your correspondence in the afternoon, and have nothing further to do. Then comes that hour when you are bored; that's the time for sex.
-- H. G. Wells -
Until a man has found God, he begins at no beginning and works to no end.
-- H. G. Wells -
So utterly at variance is Destiny with all the little plans of men.
-- H. G. Wells -
If the world does not please you, you can change it.
-- H. G. Wells -
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