H.G. Wells

“His studies were pursued but never effectually overtaken.”

“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.”

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

“Our true nationality is mankind.”

“Sooner or later it must come out, even if other men rediscover it. And then...Governments and powers will struggle to get hither, they will fight against one another and against these moon people. It will only spread warfare and multiply the occasions of war. In a little while, in a very little while if I tell my secret, this planet to it's deepest galleries will be strewn with human dead. Other things are doubtful, but this is certain...It is not as though man had any use for the moon. What good would the moon be to men? Even of their own planet what have they made but a battleground and theatre of infinite folly? Small as his world is, and short as his time, he has still in his little life down there far more than he can do. No! Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use. It is time she held her hand. Let him find it out for himself again-in a thousand years' time.”

“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.”

“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...”

“In the middle of the night she woke up dreaming of huge white heads like turnips, that came trailing after her, at the end of interminable necks, and with vast black eyes. But being a sensible woman, she subdued her terrors and turned over and went to sleep again.”

“There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, andnot in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever ismore than animal within us must find its solace and its hope. I hope, or Icould not live.”

“Hunger and a lack of blood-corpuscles take all the manhood from a man.”

“It is when suffering finds a voice andsets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.”

“By this time I was nolonger very much terrified or very miserable. I had, as it were, passed thelimit of terror and despair. I felt now that my life was practically lost,and that persuasion made me capable of daring anything”

“But, as I say, I was toofull of excitement and (a true saying, though those who have neverknown danger may doubt it) too desperate to die.”

“For it is just this question of pain that partsus. So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick; so long as your ownpains drive you; so long as pain underlies your propositions aboutsin,—so long, I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a little less obscurelywhat an animal feels.”

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

“Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of Being”

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

“All men, however highly educated, retain some superstitious inklings.”

“Very much indeed of what we call moral education is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion.”

“We all have our time machines, don't we. Those that take us back are memories...And those that carry us forward, are dreams.”

“It's no use locking the door after the steed is stolen.”

“The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary government asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no decisive action.”

“The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice. Yet had I known such pain was in the next room, and had it been dumb, I believe—I have thought since—I could have stood it well enough. It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us. But in spite of the brilliant sunlight and the green fans of the trees waving in the soothing sea-breeze, the world was a confusion, blurred with drifting black and red phantasms, until I was out of earshot of the house in the stone wall.”

“Security sets a premium on feebleness.”

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

“We will peck them to death to-morrow, my dear.”

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

“Sometimes, you have to step outside of the person you've been and remember the person you were meant to be. The person you want to be. The person you are.”

“once you lose yourself, you have two choices: find the person you used to be, or lose that person completely.”

“What on earth would a man do with himself, if something did not stand in his way?”

“It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. 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 a huge variety of needs and dangers.”

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

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

“For after the Battle comes quiet.”

“What, unless biological science is a mass of errors, is the cause of human intelligence and vigour? Hardship and freedom: conditions under which the active, strong, and subtle survive and the weaker go to the wall; conditions that put a premium upon the loyal alliance of capable men, upon self-restraint, patience, and decision. And the institution of the family, and the emotions that arise therein, the fierce jealousy, the tenderness for offspring, parental self-devotion, all found their justification and support in the imminent dangers of the young.”

“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.”

“He, I know - for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made - thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilisation only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end.”

“Science is a match that man has just got alight. He thought he was in a room - in moments of devotion, a temple - and that his light would be reflected from and display walls inscribed with wonderful secrets and pillars carved with philosophical systems wrought into harmony. It is a curious sensation, now that the preliminary splutter is over and the flame burns up clear, to see his hands lit and just a glimpse of himself and the patch he stands on visible, and around him, in place of all that human comfort and beauty he anticipated - darkness still.

“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.”

“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.”

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

“The sky was no longer blue. North-eastward it was inky black, and out of the blackness shone brightly and steadily the pale white stars. Overhead it was a deep Indian red and starless, and south-eastward it grew brighter to a glowing scarlet where, cut by the horizon, lay the huge hull of the sun, red and motionless. The rocks about me were of a harsh reddish colour, and all the trace of life that I could see at first was the intensely green vegetation that covered every projecting point on their south-eastern face.”

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

“Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.”

“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.”

“Aren't we all agreed about those things--in theory?'In theory, yes,' said Bobby. 'But not in reality. If every one really wanted to abolish the difference of rich and poor it would be as easy as pie to find a way. There's always a way to everything if you want to do it enough. But nobody really wants to do these things. Not as we want meals. All sorts of other things people want, but wanting to have no rich and poor any more isn't real wanting; it is just a matter of pious sentiment. And so it is about war. We don't want to be poor and we don't want to be hurt or worried by war, but that's not wanting to end those things.”

“I hope, or I could not live.”

“I stood staring, not as yet realising that this was death leaping from man to man in that little distant crowd.”

“To sit among all those unknown things before a puzzle like that is hopeless. That way lies monomania. 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.”

“I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there.”