H.G. Wells Quotes

H.G. Wells Quotes

The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.

If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it.

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.

You cannot imagine the craving for rest that I feel - a hunger and thirst. For six long days, since my work was done, my mind has been a whirlpool, swift, unprogressive and incessant, a torrent of thoughts leading nowhere, spinning round swift and steady

I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world

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.

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. I hope, or I
could not live.

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

Now whenever things are so that a lot of people feel they ought to be doing something, the weak, and those who go weak with a lot of complicated thinking, always make for a sort of do-nothing religion,...

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

I had not, I said to myself, come into the future to carry on a miniature flirtation.

For after the Battle comes quiet.

Modern war, modern international hostility is, I believe, possible only through the stupid illiteracy of the mass of men and the conceit and intellectual indolence of rulers and those who feed the public mind.

Be a Man!' Said I, 'You are scared out of your wits! 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.

The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature.

The peaceful splendour of the night healed again. The moon was now past the meridian and travelling down the west. It was at its full, and very bright, riding through the empty blue sky.

If we don't end war, war will end us.

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.

It is love and reason,' I said,'fleeing from all the madness of war.

This isn't a war," said the artilleryman. "It never was a war, any more than there's war between man and ants.

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.

What I want to know is, in the Middle Ages, did they do anything for Housemaid's Knee? What did they put in their hot baths after jousting?

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

The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain
in the world had found a voice

I never yet heard of a useless thing that was not ground out of
existence by evolution sooner or later. Did you? And pain gets needless.

It is when suffering finds a voice and
sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.

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.

There is no liberty, save wisdom and self-control. Liberty is within-not without. It is each man's own affair.

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.

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?

It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening.

My pockets had always puzzled Weena, but at the last she had concluded that they were an eccentric kind of vase for floral decoration.

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.

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