H. G. Wells quotes - page 4

The past is but the past of a beginning. (H. G. Wells)
Sailors ought never to go to church. They ought to go to hell, where it is much more comfortable. View quote
H. G. Wells
I want to go ahead of Father Time with a scythe of my own. View quote
H. G. Wells
Once the command of the air is obtained by one of the contending armies, the war becomes a conflict between a seeing host and one that is blind. View quote
H. G. Wells
The path of social advancement is, and must be, strewn with broken friendships. View quote
H. G. Wells
I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea. View quote
H. G. Wells
Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge. View quote
H. G. Wells
While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he were sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness in not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful. View quote
H. G. Wells
We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century - for several centuries. View quote
H. G. Wells
After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true. View quote
H. G. Wells
To me it is quite credible that the Martians may be descended from beings not unlike ourselves, by a gradual development of brain and hands (the latter giving rise to the two bunches of delicate tentacles at last) at the expense of the rest of the body. Without the body the brain would, of course, become a mere selfish intelligence, without any of the emotional substratum of the human being. (H. G. Wells)
Great and little cannot understand one another. But in every child born of man, Father Redwood, lurks some seed of greatness - waiting for the Food. View quote
H. G. Wells
Raymond Passworthy: Oh, God, is there ever to be any age of happiness? Is there never to be any rest? View quote
H. G. Wells
And this Thing I saw! How can I describe it? A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder. View quote
H. G. Wells
On the supposition that the world is to go on divided among aggressive sovereign states, with phases of war preparation known as peace and acute phases of more and more destructive war, it is quite a good move in the game. On the supposition that the world is growing up to an age of reason, and that a world of civilisation is attainable, it is a monstrous crime. View quote
H. G. Wells
The man's become inhuman, I tell you," said Kemp. "I am as sure he will establish a reign of terror-so soon as he has got over the emotions of this escape-as I am sure I am talking to you. Our only chance is to be ahead. He has cut himself off from his kind. His blood be upon his own head. View quote
H. G. Wells
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. View quote
H. G. Wells
Kipps was unprepared for the unpleasant truth; that the path of social advancement is and must be strewn with broken friendships. View quote
H. G. Wells
Every citizen knows his place. He is born to that place, and the elaborate discipline of training and education and surgery he undergoes fits him at last so completely to it that he has neither ideas nor organs for any purpose beyond it. View quote
H. G. Wells
Man is an imperfect animal and never quite trustworthy in the dark. View quote
H. G. Wells
"By Heaven, Kemp, you don't know what rage is! To have worked for years, to have planned and plotted, and then to get some fumbling purblind idiot messing across your course! Every conceivable sort of silly creature that has ever been created has been sent to cross me."If I have much more of it, I shall go wild-I shall start mowing 'em."As it is, they've made things a thousand times more difficult.""No doubt it's exasperating," said Kemp, dryly. (H. G. Wells)
I have remarked, in the course of such air travel as I have done, that the airmen of all nations have a common resemblance to each other and that the patriotic virus in their blood is largely corrected by a wider professionalism. View quote
H. G. Wells
I remember I felt an extraordinary persuasion that I was being played with, that presently, when I was upon the very verge of safety, this mysterious death--as swift as the passage of light--would leap after me from the pit about the cylinder and strike me down. View quote
H. G. Wells
So last January, with the beginning of a snowstorm in the air about me-and if it settled on me it would betray me!-weary, cold, painful, inexpressibly wretched, and still but half convinced of my invisible quality, I began this new life to which I am committed. I had no refuge, no appliances, no human being in the world in whom I could confide. To have told my secret would have given me away-made a mere show and rarity of me. Nevertheless, I was half-minded to accost some passer-by and throw myself upon his mercy. But I knew too clearly the terror and brutal cruelty my advances would evoke. I made no plans in the street. My sole object was to get shelter from the snow, to get myself covered and warm; then I might hope to plan. But even to me, an Invisible Man, the rows of London houses stood latched, barred, and bolted impregnably. View quote
H. G. Wells
Over me, around me, closing in on me, embracing me ever nearer, was the Eternal; that which was before the beginning, and that which triumphs over the end; that enormous void in which all light and life and being is but the thin and vanishing splendour of a falling star, the cold, the stillness, the silence-the infinite and final Night of space. View quote
H. G. Wells