What good is religion if it collapses under calamity?

Face this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all.

There are no social differences – till women come in.

There is no reason whatever to believe that the order of nature has any greater bias in favour of man than it had in favour of the ichthyosaur or the pterodactyl.

Books-bright windows in this life of ours, lit by the shining souls of men.

This is the end and the beginning of an age. This is something far greater than the French Revolution or the Reformation and we live in it.

All men, however highly educated, retain some superstitious inklings.

Life falls into place only with God.

A young mistress is better than an old master.

I do not believe I have any immortality. The greatest evil in the world today is the Christian religion

This blessed gift of smoking!

Countless people…will hate the New World Order…and will die protesting against it…we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents.

States organized for war will make war as surely as hens will lay eggs.

It is the system of nationalist individualism that has to go….We are living in the end of the sovereign states….In the great struggle to evoke a Westernized World Socialism, contemporary governments may vanish….Countless people…will hate the new world order….and will die protesting against it.

Every one of these hundreds of millions of human beings is in some form seeking happiness…. Not one is altogether noble nor altogether trustworthy nor altogether consistent; and not one is altogether vile…. Not a single one but has at some time wept.

The greatest task of democracy, its ritual and feast – is choice.

The cat, which is a solitary beast, is single minded and goes its way alone, but, the dog, like his master, is confused in his mind.

Strength is the outcome of need.

Success is to be measured not by wealth, power, or fame, but by the ratio between what a man is and what he might be.

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.

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

Endless conflicts. Endless misunderstanding. All life is that. Great and little cannot understand one another.

Christ is the most unique person of history. No man can write a history of the human race without giving first and foremost place to the penniless Teacher of Nazareth.

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

Will is stronger than fact: it can mold and overcome fact.

To be honest, one must be inconsistent.

The Islamic teachings have left great traditions for equitable and gentle dealings and behavior, and inspire people with nobility and tolerance. These are human teachings of the highest order and at the same time practicable. These teachings brought into existence a society in which hard-heartedness and collective oppression and injustice were the least as compared with all other societies preceding it….Islam is replete with gentleness, courtesy, and fraternity.

If anything is possible, then nothing is interesting.

It was tough going. His world was in the grips of the last Ice Age. In Southern Africa it was drier than now, water was difficult to obtain and so were animals.

It is possible to believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening.

We learn from failure, not from success.

Progress is not an illusion; it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

The only true way to understand Life is to live it yourself.

The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

The past is a ghost, the future a dream, and all we ever have is now.

A downtrodden class… will never be able to make an effective protest until it achieves solidarity.

One believes in Stephen Dedalus as one believes in few characters in fiction.

For after the Battle comes quiet.

The establishment of the world community will surely exact a price – and who can tell what that price may be? – in toil, suffering and blood.

Now the most comprehensive conception of this new world is of one politically, socially and economically united To this end a small but increasing body of people in the world set their faces and seek to direct their lives.

The passion for playing Chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world.

Ignorance is not an extension of time.

Until a man has found God, he begins at no beginning and works to no end.

So utterly at variance is Destiny with all the little plans of men.

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

It is really in the end a far more humane proceeding than our earthly method of leaving children to grow into human beings, and then making machines of them.

Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough—as most wrong theories are!

There’s this idle feeling that settles when the day’s work is done and you just want to ride around on a bike. That’s the time for sex.

In these undiscovered books on the shelf there are marvels, miracles!

Inside these old forgotten books on shelves are wonders, miracles!

Hunger makes a fool of a man.

Strychnine is a grand tonic, Kemp, to take the flabbiness out of a man.

I write to cover a frame of ideas.

All passion is madness.

.Are we all bubbles blown by a baby?

We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity.

I often think we do not take this business of photography in a sufficiently serious spirit. Issuing a photograph is like marriage: you can only undo the mischief with infinite woe .

The truly brave man is not the man who does not feel fear but the man who overcomes it.

What is your theologian’s ecstasy but Mahomet’s houri in the dark?

She always seemed to me, I fancy, more human than she was, perhaps because her affection was so human.

For a time I believed that mankind had been swept out of existence, and that I stood there alone, the last man left alive.

The man was running away with the rest, and selling his papers for a shilling each as he ran—a grotesque mingling of profit and panic.

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.

Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims.

They haven’t any spirit in them – no proud dreams and no proud lusts; and a man who hasn’t one or the other-Lord! What is he but funk and precautions.

The stranger swore briefly but vividly.

There’s some ex-traordinary things in books,” said the mariner.

You may kill me, but I can hold you – and all the universe for that matter – in the grip of this small brain. I would not change. Even now.

There was no amazement, but only an impression of delightful rightness, of being reminded of happy things that had in some strange way been overlooked.

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.

I surveyed the broad view of our old world under the sunset of that long day.

Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future.

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.

I had rather be called a journalist than an artist.

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.

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

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

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

By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth.

Night, the mother of fear and mystery, was coming upon me.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Beauty is in the heart of the beholder.

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

I was invisible, and I was only just beginning to realise the extraordinary advantage my invisibility gave me. My head was already teeming with plans of all the wild and wonderful things I had now impunity to do.

I went over the heads of the things a man reckons desirable. No doubt invisibility made it possible to get them, but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they are got.

To do such a thing would be to transcend magic. And I beheld, unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of all that invisibility might mean to a man — the mystery, the power, the freedom.

Our business here is to be Utopian, to make vivid and credible, if we can, first this facet and then that, of an imaginary whole and happy world.

The religion of the atheist has a God-shaped blank at it’s heart.

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

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.

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

Our chairs, being his patents, embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat upon.

Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness.

At first things were very confusing. Everything was so entirely different from the world I had known – even the flowers.

And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers – shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle – to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.

Scientific people . . . know very well that Time is only a kind of Space.

The question had come into my mind abruptly: were these creatures fools? . . . You see I had always anticipated that the people of the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand odd would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art, everything.

Kipps was unprepared for the unpleasant truth; that the path of social advancement is and must be strewn with broken friendships.

Every citizen knows his place. He is born to that place, and the elaborate discipline of training and education and surgery he undergoes fits him at last so completely to it that he has neither ideas nor organs for any purpose beyond it.

Oswald Cabal: 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.

Rowena: I don’t suppose any man has ever understood any woman since the beginning of things. You don’t understand our imaginations, how wild our imaginations can be.

Since the passing of Victoria the Great there had been an accumulating uneasiness in the national life. It was as if some compact and dignified paper-weight had been lifted from people’s ideas, and as if at once they had begun to blow about anyhow.

In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use. It is time she held her hand.

What on earth would a man do with himself, if something did not stand in his way?

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.

The professional military mind is by necessity an inferior and unimaginative mind; no man of
high intellectual quality would willingly imprison his gifts in such a calling.

Fools make researches and wise men exploit them.

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 not reasonable that those who gamble with mens lives should not stake their own.

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

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

Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of the organized life.

Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia.

Go away…I’m alright.

I see knowledge increasing and human power increasing. I see ever-increasing possibilities before life, And I see no limits set to it at all, Existence impresses me as a perpetual dawn. Our lives, as I apprehend, are great in expectations.

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

Non-violence is the policy of the vegetable kingdom.

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.

Human history is, in essence, a history of ideas.

Humanity either makes, or breeds, or tolerates all its afflictions, great or small.

Human society is based on want. Life is based on want. Wild-eyed visionaries may dream of a world without need. Cloud-cuckoo-land. It can’t be done.

Strength is the outcome of need security sets a premium on feebleness.

I never yet heard of a useless thing that was not ground out of existence by evolution sooner or later.

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.

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

The history of India for many centuries had been happier, less fierce, and more dreamlike than any other history. In these favorable conditions, they built a character – meditative and peaceful and a nation of philosophers such as could nowhere have existed except in India.

For all my desire to be interesting, I have to confess that for most things and people I don’t give a damn.

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

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

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?

It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble.

To grow and still to grow, that is the law of life. What other law can there be?

There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven.

Great and little cannot understand one another… But in every child born of man, lurks some seed of greatness.

Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims.

For neither do men live nor die in vain.

No compulsion in the world is stronger than the urge to edit someone else’s document.

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

Life is a debatable subject, and Wells too pondered on this very question, providing us with many quotes for us to think over.

An artist who theorizes about his work is no longer artist but critic.

To ride a bicycle properly is very like a love affair; chiefly it is a matter of faith. Believe you do it, and the thing is done; doubt, and for the life of you, you cannot.

Cynicism is humor in ill health.

Man is an imperfect animal and never quite trustworthy in the dark.

We were making the future, and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making.

The uglier a man’s legs are, the better he plays at golf. It’s almost a law.

I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there.

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.

The plain message physical science has for the world at large is this, that were our political and social and moral devices only as well contrived to their ends as a linotype machine, an antiseptic operating plant, or an electric tram-car, there need now at the present moment be no appreciable toil in the world.

The choice is: the Universe…or nothing.

So I travelled, stopping ever and again, in great strides of a thousand years or more, drawn on by the mystery of the earth’s fate, watching with a strange fascination the sun grow larger and duller in the westward sky, and the life of the old earth ebbing out.

Science stands, a too competant servant, behind her wrangling underbred masters, holding out resources, devices, and remedies they are too stupid to use. … And on its material side, a modern Utopia must needs present these gifts as taken.

Satan delights equally in statistics and in quoting scripture.

Life, forever dying to be born afresh, forever young and eager, will presently stand upon this Earth as upon a footstool, and stretch out its realm amidst the stars.

In the past century, there were more changes than in the previous thousand years. The new century will see changes that will dwarf those of the last.

If we can possibly avoid wrecking this little planet of ours, we will, But—there must be risks! There must be. In experimental work there always are!

I stood there with only the weapons and the powers that Nature had endowed me with – hands, feet, and teeth.

The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.

This isn’t a war… It never was a war, any more than there’s a war between men and ants.

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

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

If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn’t expecting it.

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.

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

The true strength of the human intellect lies not in seeing what is immediately before us, but in anticipating what comes next.

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

We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they’re called memories. Some take us forward, they’re called dreams.

There’s truths you have to grow into.

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.

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.

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

Fact takes no heed of human hopes.

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

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.

Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write!

Am I dreaming? Has the world gone mad – or have I?

The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.

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

Good books are the warehouses of ideas.

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

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

There is no more evil thing in this world than race prejudice, none at all. […] It justifies and holds together more baseness, cruelty, and abomination than any other sort of error in the world.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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