Top 100 H.G.Wells Quotes
#1. She always seemed to me, I fancy, more human than she was, perhaps because her affection was so human.
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#2. The truly brave man is not the man who does not feel fear but the man who overcomes it.
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#3. I was never a great amorist, though I have loved several people very deeply.
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#4. The ethical system that will dominate the world-state will be shaped primarily to favor the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity - beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds - and to check the procreation of base and servile type.
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#5. We've got to escape from narrowness. We're a movement, not a conspiracy. We've got to radiate contacts, and have as many people aware of us as possible. That's living, modern common sense.
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#6. We should remember how repulsive our carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit.
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#7. We live in reference to past experience and not to future events, however inevitable.
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#8. Nothing remains interesting where anything may happen.
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#9. Anthropology has been compared to a great region, marked out indeed as within the sphere of influence of science, but unsettled and for the most part unsubdued. Like all such hinterland sciences, it is a happy hunting-ground for adventurers.
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#10. Mankind has got to start getting the big things right.
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#11. Of the risks a man has got to take! Now the risk was inevitable, I no longer saw it in the same cheerful light. The fact is that, insensibly, the absolute strangeness of everything, the sickly jarring and swaying of the machine,
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#12. The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us.
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#13. The fertilising conflict of individualities is the ultimate meaning of the personal life.
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#14. Take it as a lie - or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction.
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#15. Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
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#16. But-! I say! The common conventions of humanity-'
'Are all very well for common people.
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#17. 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.
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#19. The Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to and humbug themselves for the general Good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry.
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#20. The lawgiver, of all beings, most owes the law allegiance.
He of all men should behave as though the law compelled him.
But it is the universal weakness of mankind that what we are
given to administer we presently imagine we own.
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#21. That's what we are now - just ants. Only - "
"Yes," I said.
"We're eatable ants.
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#22. We are all members of one body.
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#23. Marriage isn't what it was. It's become a different thing because women have become human beings.
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#24. Humanity had been strong, energetic, and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now came the reaction of the altered conditions.
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#25. Life, forever dying to be born afresh, forever young and eager, will presently stand upon this Earth as upon a footstool, and stretch out its realm amidst the stars.
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#26. But by that time Lady Harman had acquired the habit of reading and the habit of thinking over what she read, and from that it is an easy step to thinking over oneself and the circumstances of one's own life. The one thing trains for the other.
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#27. We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle and mystery.
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#28. The true objection to slavery is not that it is unjust to the inferior but that it corrupts the superior.
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#29. There is no way out or round or through.
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#30. The Athenian democracy suffered much from that narrowness of patriotism which is the ruin of all nations.
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#31. This world is out of joint. It's broken up and I doubt if it'll heal. I doubt very much if it'll heal. We are in the beginning of the sickness of the world!
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#32. I perceived that I was hungry, and prepared to clamber out of the hammock which, very politely anticipating my intention, twisted round and deposited me upon the floor.
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#33. There were half a dozen villas burning on the Woking border.
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#34. There's some ex-traordinary things in books, said the mariner.
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#35. 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.
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#36. You Americans have the loveliest wine in the world, you know, but you don't realize it. You call them domestic and that's enough to start trouble anywhere.
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#37. They were put into my pockets by Weena, when I traveled into Time.
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#38. The voice was indisputable. It continued to swear with that breadth and variety that distinguishes the swearing of a cultivated man.
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#39. It is not much good thinking of a thing unless you think it out.
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#40. You've made a beast of yourself,- to the beasts you may go.
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#41. And this spreading usurpation of the world was so dexterously performed - a proteus - hundreds of banks, companies, syndicates, masked the Council's operations - that it was already far advanced before common men suspected the tyranny that had come. The
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#42. Yet the voice was indisputable. It continued to swear with that breadth and variety that distinguishes the swearing of a cultivated man. It
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#43. We have learned now that we cannot regard this planet as being fenced in and a secure abiding place for Man we can never anticipate the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space.
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#44. No place is safe - no place is at peace. There is no place where a women and her daughter can hide and be at peace. The war comes through the air, bombs drop in the night. Quiet people go out in the morning, and see air-fleets passing overhead - dripping death - dripping death!
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#45. The German people are an orderly, vain, deeply sentimental and rather insensitive people. They seem to feel at their best when they are singing in chorus, saluting or obeying orders.
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#46. 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.
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#47. Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning.
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#48. Until a man has found God, he begins at no beginning and works to no end.
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#49. Christ is the most unique person of history. No man can write a history of the human race without giving first and foremost place to the penniless Teacher of Nazareth.
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#50. And being but two-and-twenty and full of enthusiasm, I said, 'I will devote my life to this. This is worth while.'
You know what fools we are at two-and-twenty?
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#51. Everywhere in the world there are ignorance and prejudice, but the greatest complex of these, with the most extensive prestige and the most intimate entanglement with traditional institutions, is the Roman Catholic Church.
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#52. Ignorance is not an extension of time
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#53. Where there is no derision the people perish," said Chiffan.
"Now who said that?" asked Steenhold, always anxious to check his quotations. "It sounds familiar."
"I said it," said Chiffan. "Get on with your suggestions.
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#54. Until under the stimulus of accumulating material, accumulating investments or other circumstances, the tide of private enterprise flowed again.
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#55. Go to the devil!" said the stranger in a tremendous voice, and "Shut that door after you." So that brief interview terminated.
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#56. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.
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#57. An idiot child screaming in a hospital." (on George Bernard Shaw)
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#58. It is really in the end a far more humane proceeding than our earthly method of leaving children to grow into human beings, and then making machines of them.
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#59. It is the going out from oneself that is love and not the accident of its return. It is the expedition, whether it fail or succeed.
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#60. Mr. Thomas Marvel hated roomy shoes, but then he hated damp. He had never properly thought out which he hated most
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#61. It is love and reason,' I said,'fleeing from all the madness of war.
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#63. The history of India for many centuries had been happier, less fierce, and more dreamlike than any other history. In these favorable conditions, they built a character - meditative and peaceful and a nation of philosophers such as could nowhere have existed except in India.
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#64. The science hangs like a gathering fog in a valley, a fog which begins nowhere and goes nowhere, an incidental, unmeaning inconvenience to passers-by.
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#65. There's nothing wrong in suffering, if you suffer for a purpose. Our revolution didn't abolish danger or death. It simply made danger and death worthwhile.
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#66. Men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise.
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#67. 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.
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#68. The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain
in the world had found a voice
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#69. Help me - and I will do great things for you. An invisible man is a man of power. He
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#70. Cynicism is humor in ill health.
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#71. I had not, I said to myself, come into the future to carry on a miniature flirtation.
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#72. Beast!" said he. "You're the beast. He takes his liquor like a Christian. Come out of the way, Prendick!
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#73. Let us get together with other people of our sort and make over the world into a great world-civilization that will enable us to realize the promises and avoid the dangers of this new time.
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#74. In politics, strangely enough, the best way to play your cards is to lay them face upwards on the table.
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#75. 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.
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#76. A time will come when men will sit with history before them or with some old newspaper before them and ask incredulously,"Was there ever such a world?"
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#77. Beauty doesn't make happiness; it only comes to the happy.
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#78. One can't always be magnificent, but simplicity is always a possible alternative.
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#79. For all my desire to be interesting, I have to confess that for most things and people I don't give a damn.
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#80. The cat, which is a solitary beast, is single minded and goes its way alone, but, the dog, like his master, is confused in his mind.
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#81. At the time there was a strong feeling in the streets that the authorities were to blame for their incapacity to dispose of the invaders without all this inconvenience.
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#82. The red tongues that went licking up my heap of wood were an altogether new and strange thing to Weena.
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#83. Satan delights equally in statistics and in quoting scripture ...
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#84. If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.
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#85. You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.
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#86. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.
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#87. Why did every human concern clog itself up in a tangle of routines, formalities, disciplines, imperatives? Why couldn't one be free? Really free? Guarding one's freedom, wasn't freedom at all. Why couldn't one win one's freedom for good and all, and get on with life?
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#88. If only I had thought of a Kodak! I could have flashed that glimpse of the Under-world in a second, and examined it at leisure.
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#89. The uglier a man's legs are, the better he plays golf - it's almost a law.
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#90. There is no remorse like a remorse of chess. It is a curse upon man. There is no happiness in chess.
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#91. The man who raises a fist has run out of ideas.
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#92. But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be inhabited? ... Are we or they Lords of the World? ... And how are all things made for man?
KEPLER (quoted in The Anatomy of Melancholy)
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#94. There are men on that Commission who would steal the brakes off a mountain railway just before they went down in it...It's a struggle with suicidal imbeciles.
The Secret Places of The Heart (Kindle Location 59)
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#95. Then suddenly the humour of the situation came into my mind: the thought of the years I had spent in study and toil to get into the future age, and now my passion of anxiety to get out of it.
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#96. And through it all, this destiny was before me," he said; "this vast inheritance of which I did not dream.
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#97. 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.
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#98. Memories are not dead things, but alive; they dwindle in disuse, but they harden and develop in all sorts of queer ways if they are being continually fretted.
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#99. Every one of these hundreds of millions of human beings is in some form seeking happiness ... Not one is altogether noble nor altogether trustworthy nor altogether consistent; and not one is altogether vile ... Not a single one but has at some time wept.
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#100. A young mistress is better than an old master.
H.G.Wells
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