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...

If only I had thought of a Kodak! I could have flashed that glimpse of the Under-world in a second, and examined it at leisure.

Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart.

I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world

We do our job and go. See? That is what Death is for. We work out all our little brains and all our little emotions, and then this lot begins afresh. Fresh and fresh! Perfectly...

Modern war, modern international hostility is, I believe, possible only through the stupid illiteracy of the mass of men and the conceit and intellectual indolence of rulers and those who feed the public mind.

So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour. Once they...

It is good to stop by the track for a space, put aside the knapsack, wipe the brows, and talk a little of the upper slopes of the mountain we think we are climbing, would...

I never yet heard of a useless thing that was not ground out ofexistence by evolution sooner or later. Did you? And pain gets needless.

It was in a swampy village on the lagoon river behind the Turner Peninsula that Pollock’s first encounter with the Porroh man occurred. The women of that country are famous for their good looks –...

The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left...

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

Advertising is legalized lying.

He began to realize that you cannot even fight happily with creatures that stand upon a different mental basis to yourself.

He has made the cat his own. He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world. English cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves.

The most evil institution in the world is the Roman Catholic Church.

In the next place, wonderful as it seems in a sexual world, the Martians were absolutely without sex, and therefore without any of the tumultuous emotions that arise…

It is when suffering finds a voice andsets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.

Already he knew something of the history of the intervening years. He had heard now of the moral decay that had followed the collapse of supernatural religion in the minds of ignoble man, the decline...

I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then.

Now whenever things are so that a lot of people feel they ought to be doing something, the weak, and those who go weak with a lot of complicated thinking, always make for a sort...

…growing a little tiresome on account of some mysterious internal discomfort that the local practitioner diagnosed as imagination

I had not, I said to myself, come into the future to carry on a miniature flirtation.

There is no liberty, save wisdom and self-control. Liberty is within–not without. It is each man’s own affair.

If after all my Atheology turns out wrong and your Theology right I feel I shall always be able to pass into Heaven (if I want to) as a friend of G.K.C.’s. Bless you.

The fertilising conflict of individualities is the ultimate meaning of the personal life.

For it is just this question of pain that partsus. So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick; so long as your ownpains drive you; so long as pain underlies your propositions aboutsin,—so...

Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.

Civilization is a race between disaster and education.

It sounds plausible enough tonight, but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.

We are to turn our backs for a space upon the insistent examination of the thing that is, and face towards the freer air, the ampler spaces of the thing that perhaps might be.

Their bodies lay flatly on the rocks, and their eyes regarded him with evil interest: but it does not appear that Mr. Fison was afraid, or that he realized that he was in any danger....

I think that it [the Church] stands for everything most hostile to the mental emancipation and stimulation of mankind. It is the completest, most highly organized system of prejudices and antagonisms in existence. Everywhere in...

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

And there it was, on a shabby bed in a tawdry, ill-lighted bedroom, surrounded by a crowd of ignorant and excited people, broken and wounded, betrayed and unpitied, that Griffin, the first of all men...

Jesus was a penniless teacher who wandered about the dusty sun-bit country of Judea, living upon casual gifts of food; yet he is always represented clean, combed, and sleek, in spotless raiment, erect, and with...

He beheld in swift succession the incidents in the brief tale of his experience. His wretched home, his still more wretched school-days, the years of vicious life he had led since then, one act of...

An idiot child screaming in a hospital.” (on George Bernard Shaw)

The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice. Yet had I known such pain was in the next room, and had...

He knew clearly enough that his imagination was growing traitor to him, and yet at times it seemed the ship he sailed in, his fellow-passengers, the sailors, the wide sea, were all part of a...