H. G. Wells quotes

We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity, and it seemed to me that here was that hateful grindstone broken at last!

— Spoken by a character · VI. The Sunset of Mankind

Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness.

— Spoken by a character · VI. The Sunset of Mankind

Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough—as most wrong theories are!

— Spoken by a character · VI. The Sunset of Mankind

There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change.

— Spoken by a character · XIII. The Trap of the White Sphinx

I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been.

— Spoken by a character · XIII. The Trap of the White Sphinx

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.

There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time.

— Spoken by a character · I. Introduction

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

— Spoken by a character · I. Introduction

It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble.

— Spoken by a character · XIII. The Trap of the White Sphinx

Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life.

— Spoken by a character · X. When Night Came

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.

And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races.

“This isn’t a war,” said the artilleryman. “It never was a war, any more than there’s war between man and ants.”

— Spoken by a character

With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter.

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.

In the end the red weed succumbed almost as quickly as it had spread. A cankering disease, due, it is believed, to the action of certain bacteria, presently seized upon it. Now by the action of natural selection, all terrestrial plants have acquired a resisting power against bacterial diseases—they never succumb without a severe struggle, but the red weed rotted like a thing already dead.

By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.

The immediate pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts.

Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims.

I was a battleground of fear and curiosity.