Top 359 Quotes & Sayings by H. G. Wells

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English author H. G. Wells.

Last updated on December 24, 2024.

Herbert George Wells was an English writer. Prolific in many genres, he wrote more than fifty novels and dozens of short stories. His non-fiction output included works of social commentary, politics, history, popular science, satire, biography and autobiography. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and has been called the "father of science fiction."

English - Author | September 21, 1866 - August 13, 1946

Source: Wikipedia

Affliction comes to us, not to make us sad but sober; not to make us sorry but wise.

H. G. Wells

It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not pay with their own.

H. G. Wells

The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.

H. G. Wells

Once the command of the air is obtained by one of the contending armies, the war becomes a conflict between a seeing host and one that is blind.

H. G. Wells

The path of social advancement is, and must be, strewn with broken friendships.

H. G. Wells

History is a race between education and catastrophe.

H. G. Wells

There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.

H. G. Wells

Some people bear three kinds of trouble - the ones they've had, the ones they have, and the ones they expect to have.

H. G. Wells

We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century - for several centuries.

H. G. Wells

What really matters is what you do with what you have.

H. G. Wells

Leaders should lead as far as they can and then vanish. Their ashes should not choke the fire they have lit.

H. G. Wells

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.

H. G. Wells

Sailors ought never to go to church. They ought to go to hell, where it is much more comfortable.

H. G. Wells

Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning.

H. G. Wells

If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.

H. G. Wells

Human history in essence is the history of ideas.

H. G. Wells

The past is the beginning of the beginning and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.

H. G. Wells

There's nothing wrong in suffering, if you suffer for a purpose. Our revolution didn't abolish danger or death. It simply made danger and death worthwhile.

H. G. Wells

In politics, strangely enough, the best way to play your cards is to lay them face upwards on the table.

H. G. Wells

Cynicism is humor in ill health.

H. G. Wells

In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.

H. G. Wells

The uglier a man's legs are, the better he plays golf - it's almost a law.

H. G. Wells

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.

H. G. Wells

I had rather be called a journalist than an artist.

H. G. Wells

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.

H. G. Wells

Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.

H. G. Wells

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

H. G. Wells

The doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the main teaching of Jesus, is certainly one of the most revolutionary doctrines that ever stirred and changed human thought.

H. G. Wells

A time will come when a politician who has willfully 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 not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own.

H. G. Wells

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

H. G. Wells

I want to go ahead of Father Time with a scythe of my own.

H. G. Wells

Our true nationality is mankind.

H. G. Wells

I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.

H. G. Wells

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

H. G. Wells

The path of least resistance is the path of the loser.

H. G. Wells

While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he were sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness in not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful.

H. G. Wells

Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.

H. G. Wells

The only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we might have been on the one hand, and the thing we have made and the things we have made of ourselves on the other.

H. G. Wells

Beauty is in the heart of the beholder.

H. G. Wells

If we don't end war, war will end us.

H. G. Wells

After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.

H. G. Wells

The past is but the past of a beginning.

H. G. Wells

Heresies are experiments in man's unsatisfied search for truth.

H. G. Wells

One of the darkest evils of our world is surely the unteachable wildness of the Good.

H. G. Wells

The New Deal is plainly an attempt to achieve a working socialism and avert a social collapse in America; it is extraordinarily parallel to the successive 'policies' and 'Plans' of the Russian experiment. Americans shirk the word 'socialism', but what else can one call it?

H. G. Wells

Advertising is legalized lying.

H. G. Wells

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 done

H. G. Wells

Let your love be stronger than your hate or anger. Learn the wisdom of compromise, for it is better to bend a little than to break.

H. G. Wells

If your life doesn't end in failure, you haven't reached high enough. So it was failure I had to achieve.

H. G. Wells

When a man realizes his littleness, his greatness can appear.

H. G. Wells

He who does not contemplate the future is destined to be overwhelmed by it.

H. G. Wells

Civilization is in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.

H. G. Wells

If there is no God, nothing matters. If there is a God, nothing else matters.

H. G. Wells

The man who raises a fist has run out of ideas.

H. G. Wells

Losing your way on a journey is unfortunate. But, losing your reason for the journey is a fate more cruel.

H. G. Wells

The true strength of rulers and empires lies not in armies or emotions, but in the belief of men that they are inflexibly open and truthful and legal. As soon as a government departs from that standard it ceases to be anything more than 'the gang in possession,' and its days are numbered.

H. G. Wells

Sometimes, you have to step outside of the person you've been and remember the person you were meant to be. The person you want to be. The person you are.

H. G. Wells

There is no upper limit to what individuals are capable of doing with their minds. There is no age limit that bars them from beginning. There is no obstacle that cannot be overcome if they persist and believe.

H. G. Wells

We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle and mystery.

H. G. Wells

If the world does not please you, you can change it.

H. G. Wells