Book of Quotes

The Time Machine

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

- "Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change."

- "We should strive to welcome change and challenges, because they are what help us grow. Without them we grow weak like the Eloi in comfort and security. We need to constantly be challenging ourselves in order to strengthen our character and increase our intelligence. "

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

- "Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life."

- "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 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 a huge variety of needs and dangers."

- "And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers - shriveled 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 men."

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

- "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."

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

- "For after the Battle comes quiet."

- "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 in ambush, behind his lucid frankness."

- "We are always getting away from the present moment. Our mental existence, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave."

- "To sit among all those unknown things before a puzzle like that is hopeless. That way lies monomania. 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."

- "When she was fifteen if you'd told her

that when she was twenty she'd be going

to bed with bald-headed men and liking it,

she would have thought you very abstract."

- "Things that would have made fame of a less clever man seemed tricks in his hands. It is a mistake to do things too easily."

- "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."

- "If only I had thought of a Kodak! I could have flashed that glimpse of the Under-world in a second, and examined it at leisure."

- "There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time."

- "I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide."

- "You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, they taught you at school is founded on a misconception."

- "Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life -- the true civilizing process that makes life more and more secure -- had gone steadily on to a climax... And the harvest was what I saw."

- "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 wall; conditions that put a premium upon the loyal alliance of capable men, upon self-restraint, patience, and decision. And the institution of the family, and the emotions that arise therein, the fierce jealousy, the tenderness for offspring, parental self-devotion, all found their justification and support in the imminent dangers of the young."

- "That is the germ of my great discovery. But you are wrong to say that we cannot move about in Time. For instance, if I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence: I become absent-minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of Time, any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilized man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?"

- "This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then comes languor and decay."

- "I saw huge buildings rise up faint and fair, and pass like dreams."

- "So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour. Once they were there, they would no doubt have to pay rent, and not a little of it, for the ventilation of their caverns; and if they refused, they would starve or be suffocated for arrears. Such of them as were so constituted as to be miserable and rebellious would die; and, in the end, the balance being permanent, the survivors would become as well adapted to the conditions of underground life, and as happy in their way, as the Upper-world people were to theirs."

- "No. I cannot expect you to believe it. Take it as a lie--or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction. Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest. And taking it as a story, what do you think of it?"

- "It's against reason," said Filby.

"What reason?" said the Time Traveller."

- "They were put into my pockets by Weena, when I traveled into Time."

- "The time traveller proceeded, "any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length, Breadth, Thicknessa and Duration. But through a natural infirmity of the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to overlook this fact. There are really four dimentions, three which we call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time."