The quotations of

H. G. Wells

English writer

1866–1946

29 quotes, most often on Nature, Government and Science.

Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness.
The Time Machine (1895), Chapter VIIn context
- Character
Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough⁠—as most wrong theories are!
The Time Machine (1895), Chapter VIIn context
- Ideas
There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change.
The Time Machine (1895), Chapter XIIIIn context
- Change
- Intelligence
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
The War of the Worlds (1898), Book One: The Coming of the Martians, Chapter IIn context
- Intelligence
- Science
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.
The War of the Worlds (1898), Book One: The Coming of the Martians, Chapter IIn context
- Envy
- Intelligence
By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers
The War of the Worlds (1898), Book Two: The Earth under the Martians, Chapter VIIIIn context
- Life & Death
- Nature
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.
The Time Machine (1895), Chapter XIn context
- Nature
- Time
At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all.
The War of the Worlds (1898), Book One: The Coming of the Martians, Chapter VIIIn context
- Emotion
The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature.
The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Chapter XIVIn context
- Nature
- Science
An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.
The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Chapter XXIIn context
- Animals
- Truth & Lies
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. I hope, or I could not live.
The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Chapter XXIIIn context
- Hope
- Nature
An invisible man is a man of power.
The Invisible Man (1897), Chapter IXIn context
- Power
Great and strange ideas transcending experience often have less effect upon men and women than smaller, more tangible considerations.
The Invisible Man (1897), Chapter XIn context
- Ideas
All men, however highly educated, retain some superstitious inklings.
The Invisible Man (1897), Chapter XVIIIn context
- Education
- Thinking

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