H.G. Wells Quotes

“The question had come into my mind abruptly: were these creatures fools? . . . You see I had always anticipated that the people of the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand odd would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art, everything.”

“Scientific people . . . know very well that Time is only a kind of Space.”

“And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers – shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle – to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.”

“At first things were very confusing. Everything was so entirely different from the world I had known – even the flowers.”

“Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness.”

“Our chairs, being his patents, embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat upon.”

“As I stood there in the gathering dark I thought that in this simple explanation I had mastered the problem of the world – mastered the whole secret of these delicious people.”

“What, unless biological science is a mass of errors, is the cause of human intelligence and vigour? Hardship and freedom: conditions under which the active, strong, and subtle survive and the weaker go to the wall.”

“I have thought since how particularly ill-equipped I was for such an experience. When I had started with the Time Machine, I had started with the absurd assumption that the men of the Future would certainly be infinitely ahead of ourselves in all their appliances.”

“What if cruelty had grown into a common passion? What if in this interval the race had lost its manliness, and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful?”

“Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives – all that was over.”

“I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted.”

“Face this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all.”

“My mind was already in revolution; my guesses and impressions were slipping and sliding to a new adjustment . . . And very vaguely there came a suggestion towards the solution of the economic problem that had puzzled me.”

“The Upper-world people might once have been the favoured aristocracy . . . but that had long since passed away. The two species that had resulted from the evolution of man were sliding down towards, or had already arrived at, an altogether new relationship.”

“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.”

“The whole surface of the earth seemed changed – melting and flowing under my eyes.”

“We see some beginnings of this even in our own time, and in this future age it was complete.”

“But to me the future is still black and blank – is a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story.”

“The fact is, the Time Traveller was one of those men who are too clever to be believed.”

“There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.”

“The stranger came early in February, one wintry day, through a biting wind and a driving snow, the last snowfall of the year, over the down, walking from Bramblehurst railway station, and carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand.”

“Alone—it is wonderful how little a man can do alone! To rob a little, to hurt a little, and there is the end.”

“He is mad, inhuman…the man’s become inhuman, I tell you.”

″‘You don’t understand,’ he said, ‘who I am or what I am. I’ll show you. By Heaven! I’ll show you.’ Then he put his open palm over his face and withdrew it. The centre of his face became a black cavity.”

″‘Here,’ he said. He stepped forward and handed Mrs. Hall something which she, staring at his metamorphosed face, accepted automatically. Then, when she saw what it was, she screamed loudly, dropped it, and staggered back. The nose—it was the stranger’s nose! pink and shining—rolled on the floor.”

“‘I’ve chosen you,’ said the Voice. ‘You are the only man except some of those fools down there, who knows there is such a thing as an invisible man. You have to be my helper. Help me—and I will do great things for you. An invisible man is a man of power.‘”

“My mood, I say, was one of exaltation. I felt as a seeing man might do, with padded feet and noiseless clothes, in a city of the blind. I experienced a wild impulse to jest, to startle people, to clap men on the back, fling people’s hats astray, and generally revel in my extraordinary advantage.”

″‘But you begin to realize now,’ said the Invisible Man, ‘the full disadvantage of my condition. I had no shelter, no covering. To get clothing was to forgo all my advantage, to make of myself a strange and terrible thing. I was fasting; for to eat, to fill myself with unassimilated matter, would be to become grotesquely visible again.‘”

″‘I never blame anyone,’ said Kemp. ‘It’s quite out of fashion.‘”