H.G. Wells Quotes (26 Quotes)

And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers - shriveled 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 men.

Do days exist without calendars? Does time pass when there are no human hands left to wind the clocks?

And like blots upon the landscape rose the cupolas above the ways to the Underworld. I understood now what all the beauty of the Upperworld people covered. Very pleasant was their day, as pleasant as the day of the cattle in the ?eld. Like the cattle, they knew of no enemies and provided against no needs. And their end was the same.

I went to a box room at the top of the house and locked myself in, in order to be alone with my aching miseries.

For after the Battle comes quiet.

In the next place, wonderful as it seems in a sexual world, the Martians were absolutely without sex, and therefore without any of the tumultuous emotions that arise...

If only I had thought of a Kodak! I could have flashed that glimpse of the Under-world in a second, and examined it at leisure.

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.

It sounds plausible enough tonight, but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.

The fever of war that would presently clog vein and artery, deaden nerve, and destroy brain, had yet to develop.

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

The man was running away with the rest, and selling his papers for a shilling each as he ran-a grotesque mingling of profit and panic.

No. I cannot expect you to believe it. Take it as a lie--or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction. Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest. And taking it as a story, what do you think of it?

They haven't any spirit in them - no proud dreams and no proud lusts; and a man who hasn't one or the other-Lord! What is he but funk and precautions.

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.

We can't have any weak or silly. Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die. It's a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race.

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.

With wine and food, the confidence of my own table, and the necessity of reassuring my wife, I grew by insensible degrees courageous and secure.

They were put into my pockets by Weena, when I traveled into Time.

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.

Things that would have made fame of a less clever man seemed tricks in his hands. It is a mistake to do things too easily.

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

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

We all have our time machines.Those that take us back are memories...And those that carry us forward,are dreams!

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

We should strive to welcome change and challenges, because they are what help us grow. With out them we grow weak like the Eloi in comfort and security. We need to constantly be challenging ourselves in order to strengthen our character and increase our intelligence.