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...

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...

What I want to know is, in the Middle Ages, did they do anything for Housemaid’s Knee? What did they put in their hot baths after jousting?

Life is two things. Life is morality – life is adventure. Squire and master. Adventure rules, and morality looks up the trains in the Bradshaw. Morality tells you what is right, and adventure moves you....

Our true nationality is mankind.

The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.

For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common range of men, yet one the poor brutes we dominate know only too well. I felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow,...

But giving drugs to a cat is no joke, Kemp!

The new mathematics is a sort of supplement to language, affording a means of thought about form and quantity and a means of expression,more exact,compact, and ready than ordinary language. The great body of physical...

If we don’t end war, war will end us.

Find the thing you want to do most intensely, make sure that’s it, and do it with all your might. If you live, well and good. If you die, well and good. Your purpose is...

If it were not for collectors England would be full, so to speak, of rare birds and wonderful butterflies, strange flowers and a thousand interesting things. But happily the collector prevents all that, either killing...

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.