H.G. Wells

“The art of ignoring is one of the accomplishments of every well-bred girl, so carefully instilled that at last she can even ignore her own thoughts and her own knowledge.”

“To Europe she was America. To America she was the gateway to the earth. But to tell the story of New York would be to write a social history of the world.”

“It was some time before I could summon resolution to go down through the trees and bushes upon the flank of the headland to the beach. At last I did it at a run; and as I emerged from the thicket upon the sand, I heard some other body come crashing after me. At that I completely lost my head with fear, and began running along the sand. Forthwith there came the swift patter of soft feet in pursuit. I gave a wild cry, and redoubled my pace. Some dim, black things about three or four times the size of rabbits went running or hopping up from the beach towards the bushes as I passed.”

“Restraint, soberness, the matured thought, the unselfish act, they are necessities of the barbarous state, the life of dangers. Dourness is man's tribute to unconquered nature.”

“What right have they to hope? They work ill and they want the reward of those who work well. The hope of mankind - what is it? That some day the Over-man may come, that some day the inferior, the weak and the bestial may be subdued or eliminated. Subdued if not eliminated. The world is no place for the bad, the stupid, the enervated. Their duty - it's a fine duty too! - is to due. The death of the failure! That is the path by which the beast rose to manhood, by which man goes on to higher things.”

“After telephone, kinematograph and phonograph had replaced newspaper, book schoolmaster and letter, to live outside the range of the electric cables was to live an isolated savage.”

“...fact takes no heed of human hopes.”

“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.”

“I went over the heads of the things a man reckons desirable. No doubt invisibility made it possible to get them, but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they are got.”

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

“But when a man has once broken through the paper walls of everyday circumstance, those unsubstantial walls that hold so many of us securely prisoned from the cradle to the grave, he has made a discovery. If the world does not please you, you can change 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.”

“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")”

“An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.”

“It was Plutarch, you know, and nothing intrinsically American that prevented George Washington being a King...”

“...the voice was indisputable. It continued to swear with that breadth and variety that distinguishes the swearing of a cultivated man.”

“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?”

“Life is two things. Life is morality – life is adventure. Squire and master. Adventure rules, and morality looks up the trains in the Bradshaw. Morality tells you what is right, and adventure moves you. If morality means anything it means keeping bounds, respecting implications, respecting implicit bounds. If individuality means anything it means breaking bounds – adventure.”

“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”

“I think that at that time none of us quite believed in the Time Machine. The fact is, the Time Traveler 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. Had Filby shown the model and explained the matter in the Time Traveller's words, we should have shown him far less skepticism. For we should have perceived his motives; a pork butcher could understand Filby.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Cynisism is humour in ill health.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Strychnine is a grand tonic, Kemp, to take the flabbiness out of a man.”

“The day of democracy is past," he said. "Past for ever. That day began with the bowmen of Crecy, it ended when marching infantry, when common men in masses ceased to win the battles of the world, when costly cannon, great ironclads, and strategic railways became the means of power. To-day is the day of wealth. Wealth now is power as it never was power before—it commands earth and sea and sky. All power is for those who can handle wealth....”

“Go away. I'm all right. [last words]”

“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 do not know how far my experience is common. 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.”

“Not to go on all-Fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?”

“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.”

“Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life.”

“Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.”

“What is your theologian's ecstasy but Mahomet's houri in the dark?”

“The serious people who took him seriously never felt quite sure of his deportment; they were somehow aware that trusting their reputations for judgment with him was like furnishing a nursery with egg-shell china.”

“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?”

“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.”

“Only people who are well off can be - complex.”

“There's truths you have to grow into.”

“What really matters is what you do with what you have.”

“That Anarchist world, I admit, is our dream; we do believe - well, I, at any rate, believe this present world, this planet, will some day bear a race beyond our most exalted and temerarious dreams, a race begotten of our wills and the substance of our bodies, a race, so I have said it, 'who will stand upon the earth as one stands upon a footstool, and laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars,' but the way to that is through education and discipline and law. Socialism is the preparation for that higher Anarchism; painfully, laboriously we mean to destroy false ideas of property and self, eliminate unjust laws and poisonous and hateful suggestions and prejudices, create a system of social right-dealing and a tradition of right-feeling and action. Socialism is the schoolroom of true and noble Anarchism, wherein by training and restraint we shall make free men.”

“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.”

“Are we all bubbles blown by a baby?”

“Room to swing a cat, it seemed was absolutely essential. It was an infrequent but indispensable operation.”

“I wonder," said Graham.Ostrog stared.Must the world go this way?" said Graham, with his emotions at the speaking point. "Must it indeedgo in this way? Have all our hopes been vain?"What do you mean?" said Ostrog. "Hopes?"I came from a democratic age. And I find an aristocratic tyranny!"Well, — but you are the chief tyrant."Graham shook his head.”

“The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.”

“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. ”

“Alone-- it is wonderful how little a man can do alone! To rob a little, to hurt a little, and there is the end.”

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