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H. G. Wells quotes

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“Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness.” H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
“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, The Time Machine
“This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then come languor and decay.” H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
“We are always getting away from the present moment. Our mental existences, 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, The Time Machine
“It never was a war, any more than there's war between man and ants.” H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
“Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was coming upon me.” H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
“Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough—as most wrong theories are!” H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
“There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.” H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
“All men, however highly educated, retain some superstitious inklings.” H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man
“Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.” H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
“And you cannot move at all in Time, you cannot get away from the present moment.” H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
“What good is religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! Did you think God had exempted Weybridge? He is not an insurance agent.” H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
“Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness.” H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
“She always seemed to me, I fancy, more human than she was, perhaps because her affection was so human.” H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
“And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers—shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle—to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.” H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
“Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real existence?” H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
“We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity, and, it seemed to me, that here was that hateful grindstone broken at last!” H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
“The too-perfect security of the Upper-worlders had led them to a slow movement of degeneration, to a general dwindling in size, strength, and intelligence.” H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
“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, The War of the Worlds
“Are we bubbles blown by a baby?” H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau
“What if cruelty had grown into a common passion? What if in this interval the race had lost its manliness and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful?” H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
“I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world when I saw it suffering the painful disorder of this island.” H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau
“It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.” H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau
“The fact is, the Time Traveller was one of those men who are too clever to be believed: you never felt that you saw all round him; you always suspected some subtle reserve, some ingenuity in ambush, behind his lucid frankness.” H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
“It sounds plausible enough to-night . . . but wait until to-morrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.” H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
“If only I had thought of a Kodak! I could have flashed that glimpse of the Underworld in a second, and examined it at leisure.” H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
“But 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, The Time Machine
“I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then.” H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
“I had not, I said to myself, come into the future to carry on a miniature flirtation.” H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
“Are you sure we can move freely in Space? Right and left we can go, backward and forward freely enough, and men always have done so. I admit we move freely in two dimensions. But how about up and down? Gravitation limits us there.” H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
“There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time.” H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
“I think that at that time none of us quite believed in the Time Machine.” H. G. Wells, The Time Machine
“The contagion of such a unanimous fear was inevitable.” H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
“She had never been out of England before, she would rather die than trust herself friendless in a foreign country, and so forth. She seemed, poor woman, to imagine that the French and the Martians might prove very similar.” H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
“dying's none so dreadful; it's the funking makes it bad.” H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
“It's no kindness to the right sort of wife . . . to make her a widow” H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
“They were both the new kind of journalist—very joyous, irreverent young men.” H. G. Wells, The Time Machine

Related topics

intelligence time fear space weakness existence energy present religion humanity danger mystery invention affection movement unknown need change strength life

Related sources

The Time Machine (25)
The War of the Worlds (8)
The Island of Doctor Moreau (3)
The Invisible Man (1)