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983f1f5
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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 up there in the moon as a thing I ought always to have known, that man is not made simply to go about being safe and comfortable and well fed and amused. Against his interest, against his happiness he is constantly being driven to do unreasonable things...
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daring
risk
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H.G. Wells |
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d54de36
|
So utterly at variance is Destiny with all the little plans of men.
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H.G. Wells |
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3e26721
|
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...
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emotion
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H.G. Wells |
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a047e98
|
He, I know - for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made - thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilisation only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end.
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H.G. Wells |
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4c5d94a
|
In the middle of the night she woke up dreaming of huge white heads like turnips, that came trailing after her, at the end of interminable necks, and with vast black eyes. But being a sensible woman, she subdued her terrors and turned over and went to sleep again.
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H.G. Wells |
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3393efb
|
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 remember that dinner table with extraordinary vividness even now. My dear wife's sweet anxious face peering at me from under the pink lampshade, the white cloth with it silver and glass table furniture--for in those days even philosophical writers had luxuries--t..
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dodos
extinction
foreshadowing
overconfidence
shortsightedness
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H.G. Wells |
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069fb44
|
But I was too restless to watch long; I'm too Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours -- that's another matter.
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H.G. Wells |
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49b1726
|
For it is just this question of pain that parts us. So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick; so long as your own pains drive you; so long as pain underlies your propositions about sin,--so long, I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a little less obscurely what an animal feels.
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pain
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H.G. Wells |
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20fcea8
|
There is still something in everything I do that defeats me, makes me dissatisfied, challenges me to further effort. Sometimes I rise above my level, sometimes I fall below it, but always I fall short of the things I dream.
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H.G. Wells |
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ad81706
|
Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity,
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H.G. Wells |
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172dd3d
|
Over me, about me, closing in on me, embracing me ever nearer, was the Eternal, that which was before the beginning and that which triumphs over the end; that enormous void in which all light and life and being is but the thin and vanishing splendour of a falling star, the cold, the stillness, the silence, - the infinite and final Night of space.
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H.G. Wells |
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3fa43b1
|
I went to a box room at the top of the house and locked myself in, in order to be alone with my aching miseries.
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H.G. Wells |
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05a7ccb
|
growing a little tiresome on account of some mysterious internal discomfort that the local practitioner diagnosed as imagination
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H.G. Wells |
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89ca8ce
|
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.
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H.G. Wells |
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5f63b36
|
Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.
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H.G. Wells |
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bd405c4
|
We're eatable ants.
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|
H.G. Wells |
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22267cf
|
With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter.
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|
H.G. Wells |
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9d4c2c7
|
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. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years.
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|
H.G. Wells |
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b1872a2
|
When Man realizes his littleness, his greatness can appear. But not before.
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humans
humbleness
|
H.G. Wells |
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71f446e
|
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 of do-nothing religion, very pious and superior, and submit to persecution and the will of the Lord.
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H.G. Wells |
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934eaf4
|
It was not the first time that conscience has turned against the methods of research.
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science
|
H.G. Wells |
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a8d0c70
|
This is a mood, however, that comes to me now, I thank God, more rarely. I have withdrawn myself from the confusion of cities and multitudes, and spend my days surrounded by wise books,--bright windows in this life of ours, lit by the shining souls of men.
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H.G. Wells |
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f6915d2
|
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 it been dumb, I believe -- I have thought since -- I could have stood it well enough. It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us. But
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H.G. Wells |
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cdc913d
|
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 the world there are ignorance and prejudice, but the greatest complex of these, with the most extensive prestige and the most intimate entanglement with traditional institutions, is the Roman Catholic Church. It pres..
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catholic
catholic-church
catholicism
church
emancipation
freedom
hostile
ignorance
intimate
mankind
prejudice
prestige
|
H.G. Wells |
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45ffc4a
|
I think that at that time none of us quite believed in the Time Machine. The fact is, the Time Traveler 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 in ambush, behind his lucid frankness. Had Filby shown the model and explained the matter in the Time Traveller's words, we should have shown him far less skepticism. For we should hav..
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disbelief
intelligence
|
H.G. Wells |
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a9afab4
|
one of those pertinacious tempers that would warm every day to a white heat and never again cool to forgiveness.
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|
H.G. Wells |
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140153e
|
There is no way out or round or through.
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|
H.G. Wells |
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a11454c
|
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 simple. What's the trouble?
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life
mortality
|
H.G. Wells |
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97e2230
|
The red tongues that went licking up my heap of wood were an altogether new and strange thing to Weena.
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humor
science-fiction
|
H.G. Wells |
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2070baf
|
Humanity had been strong, energetic, and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now came the reaction of the altered conditions.
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H.G. Wells |
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050cfe2
|
The sky was no longer blue. North-eastward it was inky black, and out of the blackness shone brightly and steadily the pale white stars. Overhead it was a deep Indian red and starless, and south-eastward it grew brighter to a glowing scarlet where, cut by the horizon, lay the huge hull of the sun, red and motionless. The rocks about me were of a harsh reddish colour, and all the trace of life that I could see at first was the intensely gree..
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H.G. Wells |
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08ae042
|
I don't know things. I'm not good enough. I'm not refined. The more you see of me, the more you'll find me out.' 'But I'm going to help you.' 'You'll 'ave to 'elp me a fearful lot.
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H.G. Wells |
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fbb9a30
|
All passion is madness.
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|
H.G. Wells |
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03808f7
|
But, as I say, I was too full of excitement and (a true saying, though those who have never known danger may doubt it) too desperate to die.
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die
|
H.G. Wells |
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03efd4e
|
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 but the trees let us see it.
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progress
teamwork
|
H.G. Wells |
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03afc10
|
In a moment I was clutched by several hands, and there was no mistaking that they were trying to haul me back. I struck another light, and waved it in their dazzled faces. You can scarce imagine how nauseatingly inhuman they looked--those pale, chinless faces and great, lidless, pinkish-grey eyes!--as they stared in their blindness and bewilderment.
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|
H.G. Wells |
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1d83c27
|
There is no liberty, save wisdom and self-control. Liberty is within--not without. It is each man's own affair.
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liberty
responsibility
self-control
|
H.G. Wells |
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2e2c6d4
|
even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.
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|
H.G. Wells |
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0e45d15
|
It's just men and ants. There's the ants builds their cities,live their lives, have wars, revolutions, until men want them out of the way, and then they go out of the way. That's what we are now _ just ants.
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|
humans
war-of-the-worlds
|
H.G. Wells |
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9ff9114
|
Surely, if we have learned nothing else, this war has taught us pity--pity for those witless souls that suffer our dominion.
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|
H.G. Wells |
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2031b31
|
They are mad; they are fools," said the Dog-man."
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|
H.G. Wells |
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e85391b
|
As night goes round the Earth always there are hundreds of thousands of people who should be sleeping, lying awake, fearing a bully, fearing a cruel competition, dreading lest they cannot make good, ill of some illness they cannot comprehend, distressed by some irrational quarrel, maddened by some thwarted instinct or some suppressed perverted desire.
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ignorance
suffering
|
H.G. Wells |
|
70d2502
|
Before, they had been beasts, their instincts fitly adapted to their surroundings, and happy as living things may be. Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence, begun in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau --
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|
|
H.G. Wells |
|
8f44abc
|
And then," said Sarnac, "I remember that I made a prophecy. I made it - when did I make it? Two thousand years ago? Or two weeks ago? I sat in Fanny's little sitting-room, an old-world creature amidst her old-world furnishings, and I said that men and women would not always suffer as we were suffering then. I said that we were still poor savages, living only in the bleak dawn of civilisation, and that we suffered because we were under-bred,..
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utopianism
|
H.G. Wells |