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H.G. Wells Quotes | Quotes said by H.G. Wells

  • H.G. Wells Quote #1

    ...I suppose it is a lingering trace of Plutarch and my ineradicable boyish imagination that at bottom our State should be wise, sane, and dignified, that makes me think a country which leaves its medical and literary criticism, or indeed any such vitally important criticism, entirely to private enterprise and open to the advances of any purchaser much be in a frankly hopeless condition.


  • H.G. Wells Quote #2

    [A]fter all it was true that a girl does not go alone in the world unchallenged, nor ever has gone freely alone in the world, that evil walks abroad and dangers, and petty insults more irritating than dangers, lurk.

  • H.G. Wells Quote #3

    {Wells discussing his experiences with Christianity}

    I realised as if for the first time, the menace of these queer shaven men in lace and petticoats who had been intoning, responding, and going through ritual gestures at me. I realised something dreadful about them. They were thrusting an incredible and ugly lie upon the world and the world was making no such resistance as I was disposed to make to this enthronement of cruelty. Either I had to come into this immense luminous coop and submit, or I had to declare the Catholic Church, the core and substance of Christendom with all its divines, sages, saints, and martyrs, with successive thousands of believers, age after age, wrong.

    ...I found my doubt of his essential integrity, and the shadow of contempt it cast, spreading out from him to the whole Church and religion of which he with his wild spoutings about the agonies of Hell, had become the symbol. I felt ashamed to be sitting there in such a bath of credulity.

  • H.G. Wells Quote #4

    …growing a little tiresome on account of some mysterious internal discomfort that the local practitioner diagnosed as imagination

  • H.G. Wells Quote #5

    A boy is a creature of odd feelings.

  • H.G. Wells Quote #6

    A shell in the pit, said I, if the worst comes to worst will kill them all.

    The intense excitement of the events had no doubt left my perceptive powers in a state of erethism. I remember that dinner table with extraordinary vividness even now. My dear wife's sweet anxious face peering at me from under the pink lampshade, the white cloth with it silver and glass table furniture—for in those days even philosophical writers had luxuries—the crimson-purple wine in my glass, are photographically distinct. At the end of it I sat, tempering nuts with a cigarette, regretting Ogilvy's rashness, and denouncing the shortsighted timidity of the Martians.

    So some respectable dodo in the Mauritius might have lorded it in his nest, and discussed the arrival of that shipful of pitiless sailors in want of animal food. We will peck them to death tomorrow, my dear.

  • H.G. Wells Quote #7

    A time will come when a politician who has wilfully 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 Quote #8

    Already he knew something of the history of the intervening years. He had heard now of the moral decay that had followed the collapse of supernatural religion in the minds of ignoble man, the decline of public honour, the ascendency of wealth. For men who had lost their belief in God had still kept their faith in property, and wealth ruled a venial world.

  • H.G. Wells Quote #9

    An idiot child screaming in a hospital. (on George Bernard Shaw)

  • H.G. Wells Quote #10

    An immense and ever-increasing wealth of knowledge is scattered about the world today; knowledge that would probably suffice to solve all the mighty difficulties of our age, but it is dispersed and unorganized. We need a sort of mental clearing house for the mind: a depot where knowledge and ideas are received, sorted, summarized, digested, clarified and compared

  • H.G. Wells Quote #11

    And there it was, on a shabby bed in a tawdry, ill-lighted bedroom, surrounded by a crowd of ignorant and excited people, broken and wounded, betrayed and unpitied, that Griffin, the first of all men to make himself invisible, Griffin, the most gifted physicist the world has ever seen, ended in infinite disaster his strange and terrible career.

  • H.G. Wells Quote #12

    As night goes round the Earth always there are hundreds of thousands of people who should be sleeping, lying awake, fearing a bully, fearing a cruel competition, dreading lest they cannot make good, ill of some illness they cannot comprehend, distressed by some irrational quarrel, maddened by some thwarted instinct or some suppressed perverted desire.

  • H.G. Wells Quote #13

    Be a man!... 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 that God had exempted [us]? He is not an insurance agent.

  • H.G. Wells Quote #14

    But giving drugs to a cat is no joke, Kemp!

  • H.G. Wells Quote #15

    But he was one of those weak creatures, void of pride, timorous, anemic, hateful souls, full of shifty cunning, who face neither God nor man, who face not even themselves.

  • H.G. Wells Quote #16

    But, as I say, I was too
    full of excitement and (a true saying, though those who have never
    known danger may doubt it) too desperate to die.

  • H.G. Wells Quote #17

    By this time I was no
    longer very much terrified or very miserable. I had, as it were, passed the
    limit of terror and despair. I felt now that my life was practically lost,
    and that persuasion made me capable of daring anything

  • H.G. Wells Quote #18

    Civilization is a race between disaster and education.

  • H.G. Wells Quote #19

    Eight-and-twenty years,' said I, 'I have lived, and never a ghost have I seen as yet.'

    The old woman sat staring hard into the fire, her pale eyes wide open.

    'Ay,' she broke in; 'and eight-and-twenty years you have lived and never seen the likes of this house, I reckon. There's a many things to see, when one's still but eight-and-twenty.' She swayed her head slowly from side to side. 'A many things to see and sorrow for.' (The Red Room)

  • H.G. Wells Quote #20

    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 Quote #21

    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 Quote #22

    For after the Battle comes quiet.

  • H.G. Wells Quote #23

    For it is just this question of pain that parts
    us. So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick; so long as your own
    pains drive you; so long as pain underlies your propositions about
    sin,—so long, I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a little less obscurely
    what an animal feels.

  • H.G. Wells Quote #24

    For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common range of men, yet one the poor brutes we dominate know only too well. I felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow, and suddenly confronted by the work of a dozen busy navvies digging the foundations of a house. I felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew quite clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer master, but an animal among animals; under the Martian heel.

  • H.G. Wells Quote #25

    Great land of sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asyluum, refreshment and refuge from the world of everyday! . . .

  • H.G. Wells Quote #26

    He began to realize that you cannot even fight happily with creatures that stand upon a different mental basis to yourself.

  • H.G. Wells Quote #27

    He beheld in swift succession the incidents in the brief tale of his experience. His wretched home, his still more wretched school-days, the years of vicious life he had led since then, one act of selfish dishonour leading to another; it was all clear and pitiless now, all its squalid folly, in the cold light of the dawn. He came to the hut, to the fight with the Porroh man, to the retreat down the river to Sulyma, to the Mendi assassin and his red parcel, to his frantic endeavours to destroy the head, to the growth of his hallucination. It was a hallucination! He knew it was. A hallucination merely. For a moment he snatched at hope. He looked away from the glass, and on the bracket, the inverted head grinned and grimaced at him... With the stiff fingers of his bandaged hand he felt at his neck for the throb of his arteries. The morning was very cold, the steel blade felt like ice.

    (Pollock And The Porrah Man)

  • H.G. Wells Quote #28

    He blinked at the sun and dreamt that perhaps he might snare it and spare it as it went down to its resting place amidst the distant hills.

  • H.G. Wells Quote #29

    He has made the cat his own. He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world. English cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves.

  • H.G. Wells Quote #30

    He knew clearly enough that his imagination was growing traitor to him, and yet at times it seemed the ship he sailed in, his fellow-passengers, the sailors, the wide sea, were all part of a filmy phantasmagoria that hung, scarcely veiling it, between him and a horrible real world. Then the Porroh man, thrusting his diabolical face through that curtain, was the one real and undeniable thing. At that he would get up and touch things, taste something, gnaw something, burn his hand with a match, or run a needle into himself.

    (Pollock And The Porrah Man)

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