The Time Machine Quotes

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”