H.G. Wells Quotes

But I was too restless to watch long; I'm too Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours - that's another matter.

We were not making war against Germany, we were being ordered about in the King's war with Germany.

This is the end and the beginning of an age. This is something far greater than the French Revolution or the Reformation and we live in it.

Human society is based on want. Life is based on want. Wild-eyed visionaries may dream of a world without need. Cloud-cuckoo-land. It can't be done.

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

Of two evils choose the prettier.

A blunder at the right moment is better than cleverness at the wrong time.

Good enough is good enough. Perfect will make you a big fat mess every time.

Maybe people are more like the earth than we know. Maybe they have fault lines that sooner or later are going to split open under pressure.

I stared at her closely, studying her face, her eyes, everything. This was the angel that tamed a demon; the soul that trapped him and held him with a power he'd never felt before. Love.

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

We live in reference to past experience and not to future events, however inevitable.

Religions are such stuff as dreams are made of.

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.

Nonsense makes the heart grow fonder.

What has to be forgiven is not just what we do but who we are, not just our sinning but our sinfulness, not just our choices but what we have chosen in place of God.

You too can win Nobel Prizes. Study diligently. Respect DNA. Don't smoke. Don't drink. Avoid women and politics. That's my formula.

If the world does not please you, you can change it.

I hope, or I could not live.

This is emphatically an age of discoveries; but I will venture the assertion, that none but an American slaveholder could have discovered that a man born in a country was not a citizen of it.

It seems to me that I am more to the Left than you, Mr Stalin

Arson, after all, is an artificial crime...A large number of houses deserve to be burnt.

Life is short but it is wide. This too shall pass.

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

Heresies are experiments in man's unsatisfied search for truth.

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

Advice is one of those things it is far more blessed to give than to receive.

I believe in women, especially thinking women.

I believe that illness has led me to a life of gratitude, so I consider Lyme disease at this point in my life to be a blessing in disguise.

God’s holiness, then, is not only the opposite of evil; it is the measure by which we know evil to be evil.

No compulsion in the world is stronger than the urge to edit someone else's document.

A hairdresser holds a trusted place in a woman's life

We live in a world of unused and misapplied knowledge and skill.

Success is to be measured not by wealth, power, or fame, but by the ratio between what a man is and what he might be.

There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.

It is highly probable that the bulk of the Jew's ancestors 'never' lived in Palestine 'at all,' which witnesses the power of historical assertion over fact.

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.

In politics, strangely enough, the best way to play your cards is to lay them face upwards on the table.

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.

In all the round world there is no meat. There used to be. But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughterhouses.

Civilization is in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.

Lies are the mortar that binds the savage individual man into the social masonry.

I love talking to people and hearing their stories. Everyone's got their own story to tell, and when you sit down with someone and really talk to them, you can learn so much.

The past is the beginning of the beginning and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.

... life falls into place only with God.

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.

The teacher, whether mother, priest, or schoolmaster, is the real maker of history.

Where there's a will there's a detective story.

The passion for playing Chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world

Our business here is to be Utopian, to make vivid and credible, if we can, first this facet and then that, of an imaginary whole and happy world.