H. G. Wells (1866–1946,) fully Herbert George Wells, was an English novelist, journalist, sociologist, and historian. His reputation rests on his pioneering science fiction books and comic novels. One of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, Wells is regarded as the chief literary spokesperson of the liberal optimism that preceded World War I.
Born in Bromley, Kent, Wells studied biology with Thomas Henry Huxley and was a biology lecturer before becoming a novelist. He produced in 50 years a body of work that includes more than 40 novels, political, sociological, and philosophical treatises, textbooks and histories, autobiographies and biographies, journalism and letters, as well as his scientific romances and some 70 short stories.
The most artistically fruitful period of Wells’s career spans the first 15 years, during which time he wrote his best short fiction such as The Time Machine (1895,) The Invisible Man (1897,) and The War of the Worlds (1898,) and almost all of his collections of short stories. This combined political satire, warnings about the dangerous new powers of science, and hope for the future.
Wells’s realistic novels, considered his most exceptional achievement, include Tono-Bungay (1909) and The History of Mr. Polly (1910.) Among his other works are A Modern Utopia (1905) and The Outline of History (1920.) Experiment in Autobiography (1934) includes a striking self-portrait and studies of friends and contemporaries.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by 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
Topics: Success, Success & Failure
One of the darkest evils of our world is surely the unteachable wildness of the Good.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Goodness
The path of social advancement is, and must be, strewn with broken friendships.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Ambition, Getting Ahead
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
Topics: Government
Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Nature, Change, Acceptance
The future is the shape of things to come.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Tomorrow, The Future
The science hangs like a gathering fog in a valley, a fog which begins nowhere and goes nowhere, an incidental, unmeaning inconvenience to passers-by.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Economics, Economy
To be honest, one must be inconsistent.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Consistency, Forgiveness, Change
First we shall want the pupil to understand, speak, read, and write his mother tongue well.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Education
Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Evolution
Go away, I’m all right!
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Solitude
Cynicism is humor in ill health.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Cynicism
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Morals, Morality, Hypocrisy
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
Topics: Heaven
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
Topics: Appearance
War is a curtain of dense black fabric across all the hopes and kindliness of mankind. Yet always it has let through some gleams of light, and not—I am not dreaming—it grows threadbare, and here and there and at a thousand points the light is breaking through.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Peace
The religion of the atheist has a God-shaped blank at it’s heart
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Atheism
Religion is the first thing and the last thing, and until a man has found God and been found by God, he begins at no beginning, he works to no end.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Religion
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
Topics: Peace
I want to go ahead of Father Time with a scythe of my own.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Time Management, Time
There comes a moment in the day when you have written your pages in the morning, attended to your correspondence in the afternoon, and have nothing further to do. Then comes that hour when you are bored; that’s the time for sex.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Sex, Humankind
The forceps of our minds are clumsy things and crush the truth a little in the course of taking hold of it.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Thinking
Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Future, Just for Fun, Driving
Moral indignation is just jealousy with a halo around it.
—H. G. Wells
He was inordinately proud of England and he abused her incessantly.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Patriotism
Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was coming upon me.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Night
I am an historian, I am not a believer, but I must confess as a historian that this penniless preacher from Nazareth is irrevocably the very center of history. Jesus Christ is easily the most dominant figure in all history.
—H. G. Wells
Humanity either makes, or breeds, or tolerates all its afflictions, great or small.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Suffering
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. The three or four year’ course of lectures, the bachelor who know some, the master who knows most, the doctor who knows all, are ideas that have come down unimpaired from the Middle Ages. Nowadays no one should end his learning while he lives and these university degrees are preposterous. It is true that we have multiplied universities greatly in the past hundred years, but we seem to have multiplied them altogether too much upon the old pattern.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Education
Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia.
—H. G. Wells
Humanity either makes, or breeds, or tolerates all its afflictions.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Adversity
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
—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
The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Past, Reflection
The crisis of yesterday is the joke of tomorrow.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Time, Tomorrow, Jokes, The Future, Resilience, Crises
Human history in essence is the history of ideas.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: History, Historians
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 believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Beginnings, The Future, Future
The past is but the past of a beginning.
—H. G. Wells
Fools make researches and wise men exploit them.
—H. G. Wells
Topics: Research
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
Topics: Humanity, Humankind
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