We should strive to welcome change and challenges, because they are what help us grow. With out them we grow weak like the Eloi in comfort and security. We need to constantly be challenging ourselves...

A boy is a creature of odd feelings.

I never blame any one,” said Kemp. “It’s quite out of fashion.

Be a man!… What good is religion if it collapses under calamity? Think of what earthquakes and floods, wars and volcanoes, have done before to men! Did you think that God had exempted [us]? He...

The day of democracy is past,” he said. “Past for ever. That day began with the bowmen of Crecy, it ended when marching infantry, when common men in masses ceased to win the battles of...

{Wells discussing his experiences with Christianity}I realised as if for the first time, the menace of these queer shaven men in lace and petticoats who had been intoning, responding, and going through ritual gestures at...

There’s truths you have to grow into.

A time will come when a politician who has wilfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is...

We are but phantoms, and the phantoms of phantoms, desires like cloud-shadows and wills of straw that eddy in the wind; the days pass, use and wont carry us through as a train carries the...

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...

New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled the humiliating question arises ‘Why then are you not taking part in them?

one of those pertinacious tempers that would warm every day to a white heat and never again cool to forgiveness.

The uglier a man’s legs are, the better he plays golf. It’s almost a law.

My days I devote to reading and experiments in chemistry, and I spend many of the clear nights in the study of astronomy. There is, though I do not know how there is or why...

It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to...

Roman Catholicism is a broken and utterly desperate thing, capable only of malignant mischief in our awakening world.

A shell in the pit,” said I, “if the worst comes to worst will kill them all.”The intense excitement of the events had no doubt left my perceptive powers in a state of erethism. I...

It is love and reason,’ I said,’fleeing from all the madness of war.

No one would have believe in the last years of the nineteenth century we werebeing scrutinised like a scientist looksthrough his microscope at transient beings that swarm and multiply in a dropof water. And yet...

The tumultuous noise resolved itself now into the disorderly mingling of many voices, the gride of many wheels, the creaking of wagons, and the staccato of hoofs.

It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to...

If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.

One may picture, too, the sudden shifting of the attention, the swiftly spreading coils and bellyings of that blackness advancing headlong, towering heavenward, turning the twilight to a palpable darkness, a strange and horrible antagonist...

There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, andnot in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever ismore than animal within us must find its...

My pockets had always puzzled Weena, but at the last she had concluded that they were an eccentric kind of vase for floral decoration.

Kemp: I demonstrated conclusively this morning that invisibility–I.M: Never mind what YOU’VE DEMONSTRATED!–I’m starving, said the voice, and the night is–chilly for a man without clothes.

To Europe she was America. To America she was the gateway to the earth. But to tell the story of New York would be to write a social history of the world.

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

Sooner or later it must come out, even if other men rediscover it. And then…Governments and powers will struggle to get hither, they will fight against one another and against these moon people. It will...

By this time I was nolonger very much terrified or very miserable. I had, as it were, passed thelimit of terror and despair. I felt now that my life was practically lost,and that persuasion made...

The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature.

Hunger and a lack of blood-corpuscles take all the manhood from a man.

He blinked at the sun and dreamt that perhaps he might snare it and spare it as it went down to its resting place amidst the distant hills.

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.

You cannot imagine the craving for rest that I feel—a hunger and thirst. For six long days, since my work was done, my mind has been a whirlpool, swift, unprogressive and incessant, a torrent of...

It’s my opinion he don’t want to kill you,’ said Perea – ‘at least not yet. I’ve heard deir idea is to scar and worry a man wid deir spells, and narrow misses, and rheumatic...

In times of long established peace, when the tradition of generations has established the illusion of the profoundest human security, men’s minds are not greatly distressed by grotesqueness and absurdity in their political forms. It...

The chances of anything man-like on Mars are a million to one

[A]fter all it was true that a girl does not go alone in the world unchallenged, nor ever has gone freely alone in the world, that evil walks abroad and dangers, and petty insults more...

The peaceful splendour of the night healed again. The moon was now past the meridian and travelling down the west. It was at its full, and very bright, riding through the empty blue sky.

Eight-and-twenty years,’ said I, ‘I have lived, and never a ghost have I seen as yet.’The old woman sat staring hard into the fire, her pale eyes wide open.’Ay,’ she broke in; ‘and eight-and-twenty years...

This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then comes languor and decay.

If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn’t expecting it.

With wine and food, the confidence of my own table, and the necessity of reassuring my wife, I grew by insensible degrees courageous and secure.

But, as I say, I was toofull of excitement and (a true saying, though those who have neverknown danger may doubt it) too desperate to die.

Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done? The morning service was over, I was walking through the roads to clear my brain for the afternoon, and then—fire, earthquake, death! As if it...

The red tongues that went licking up my heap of wood were an altogether new and strange thing to Weena.

It’s against reason,” said Filby.”What reason?” said the Time Traveller.

We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity.

What is this spirit in man that urges him forever to depart from happiness and security, to toil, to place himself in danger, even to risk a reasonable certainty of death? It dawned upon me...