H. G. Wells Quotes
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Losing your way on a journey is unfortunate. But, losing your reason for the journey is a fate more cruel.
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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.
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'We were making the future,' he said, 'and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it is!'
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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.
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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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I felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew quite clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel.With us it would be as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed away.
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An artist who theorizes about his work is no longer artist but critic.
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If I am something of a social leveller, it is not because I want to give silly people a good time, but because I want to make opportunity universal, and not leave out one single being who is worth while.
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For crude classifications and false generalisations are the curse of all organised human life.
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And in the air are no streets, no channels, no point where one can say of an antagonist, 'If he wants to reach my capital he must come by here.' In the air all directions lead everywhere.
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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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The true sweetness of chess, if it ever can be sweet, is to see a victory snatched, by some happy impertinence, out of the shadow of apparently irrevocable disaster.
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Our challenge is not to educate the children we used to have or want to have, but to educate the children who come to the schoolhouse door.
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Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future.
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Practically I thought I had impunity to do whatever I chose, everything-save to give away my secret. So I thought. Whatever I did, whatever the consequences might be, was nothing to me. I had merely to fling aside my garments and vanish. No person could hold me. I could take my money where I found it.
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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.
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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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The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.
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The Jews looked for a special savior, a messiah, who was to redeem mankind by the agreeable process of restoring the fabulous glories of David and Solomon, and bringing the whole world at last under the firm but benevolent Jewish heel.
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Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write!
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Every man shall be entitled to a sound and objective education and there shall be genuine equality of opportunity. Education shall be a matter of environment as well as of instruction, and everyone shall be entitled to an education untouched by the interests of any party or religion.
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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.
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I felt naked. I felt as perhaps a bird may feel in the clear air knowing the hawk wings above and will swoop. I began to feel the need of fellowship. I wanted to question, wanted to speak, wanted to relate my experience. What is this spirit in man that urges him forever to depart from happiness, to toil and to place himself in danger?
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Room to swing a cat, it seemed was absolutely essential. It was an infrequent but indispensable operation.