Frasi di H. G. Wells pagina 3

“Questo è sempre stato il destino dell'energia nei tempi di pace: avvicinarsi all'arte e all'erotismo per poi languire e spegnersi.”

Griffin: 1998, p. 156
L'uomo invisibile

H. G. Wells libro La macchina del tempo

La macchina del tempo

“Sognai febbrilmente cose che diventavano nebulose e svanivano intorno a me fino a che tutto svanì, anche il terreno su cui stavo io, ed ebbi quell'incubo impressionante di cadere nel vuoto che avrà avuto qualche volta anche lei.”

“Un animale può essere feroce e anche astuto, ma per mentire bene non c'è che l'uomo.”

Griffin: 1998, p. 128
L'uomo invisibile

“Il naso per un cane è quello che per l'uomo sono gli occhi. I cani con il loro fiuto avvertono i movimenti di un uomo come gli uomini ne avvertono, con gli occhi, il suo aspetto.”

2016, cap. XXI, p. 88

“[…] il pensiero è meraviglioso, a volte lento come la pece fluida, a volte istantaneo come la luce. (da L'uomo che poteva compiere miracoli; p. 134)”

Griffin: 1998, p. 138
L'uomo invisibile

“Una satira mordace suona male, sulla terra ancora smossa di una tomba. (da La farfalla; p. 22)”

Racconti

“Se non poniamo fine alla guerra, la guerra porrà fine a noi.”

Racconti

“Nel mondo c'è un mucchio di straordinari deficienti.”

Origine: Citato in Call of Duty 2 e all'inizio del videoclip This Is War dei 30 Seconds To Mars.

“Over me, around 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.”

Origine: L'uomo invisibile

H. G. Wells: Frasi in inglese

“Mr. Duff Cooper, landing at New York, cools his mind by blowing off about a forthcoming revolt of the German Army and a return to monarchy in Germany, a Holy Roman Empire, I suppose, leading that new Crusade of which the Pope has been talking about recent against anti-God Russia. But quite a lot of radical people in the world, in spite of the folly, stupidity and brutality of the Stalin–Molotov attack on Finland, are averse from this idea of a religious war against Socialism and Atheism.”

H. G. Wells libro The First Men in the Moon

Origine: The First Men in the Moon (1901), Ch. 19: Mr. Bedford Alone

“The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary government asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no decisive action.”

The Rights of Man, or what are we fighting for? (1940)

“Marguerite, joyfully: “We are ourselves, my dear, we are ourselves. Well never be anyone else.””

H. G. Wells libro L'uomo invisibile

Origine: The Invisible Man (1897), Chapter 6: The Furniture that Went Mad

“Cynicism is humour in ill health.”

The New Faust https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=%22We+are+ourselves%2C+we+are+ourselves%2C+and+we%27ll+never+be+anyone+else.%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#channel=fs&q=Marguerite%2C+joyfully:+%E2%80%9CWe+are+ourselves%2C+my+dear%2C+we+are+ourselves.+We%27 (in Nash's Pall Magazine, December 1936 – adaptation of "The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham")

“Pippa' Passworthy: This little upset across the water doesn’t mean anything. Threatened men live long and threatened wars never occur.”

H. G. Wells libro Boon

Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump (1915)

“If his thinking has been sound, then this world is at the end of its tether. The end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded.”

H. G. Wells libro The Shape of Things to Come

Things to Come (1936)

“In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen rampart and stood upon its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was below me. A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it, huge mounds of material and strange shelter places. And scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians—dead!—slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.”

The Mind at the End of its Tether (1945), p. 1

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

H. G. Wells libro The War of the Worlds

Book II, Ch. 8 (Ch. 25 in editions without Book divisions): Dead London
The War of the Worlds (1898)

“These are the rights of all human beings. They are yours wherever you are. Demand that your rulers and politicians sign and observe this declaration. If they refuse, if they quibble, they can have no place in the new free world that dawns upon mankind.”

H. G. Wells libro The Discovery of the Future

The Discovery of the Future (1901)

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

The Rights of the World Citizen (1942); a revised edition of The Rights of Man

“Most striking, perhaps, in their general appearance was the disproportion between the legs of these creatures and the length of their bodies; and yet — so relative is our idea of grace — my eye became habituated to their forms, and at last I even fell in with their persuasion that my own long thighs were ungainly.”

H. G. Wells libro A Modern Utopia

Origine: A Modern Utopia (1905), Ch. 2, sect. 6

“…there has accumulated a vast tangle of emergency legislation, regulations, barriers and restraints, out of all proportion to and often missing and distorting the needs of the situation. For the restoration and modernisation of human civilization, this exaggerated outlawing of the fellow citizen whom we see fit to suspect as a traitor or revolutionary and also of the stranger within our gates, has to be restrained and brought back within the scheme of human rights.”

H. G. Wells libro The Island of Doctor Moreau

Origine: The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Ch. 15: Concerning the Beast Folk

“I hate and despise a shrewish suspicion of foreigners and foreign ways; a man who can look me in the face, laugh with me, speak truth and deal fairly, is my brother, though his skin is as black as ink or as yellow as an evening primrose.”

The Rights of Man, or what are we fighting for? (1940)

“You have been amazingly energetic and clever," this letter ran, "though what you stand to gain by it I cannot imagine. You are against me. For a whole day you have chased me; you have tried to rob me of a night's rest. But I have had food in spite of you, I have slept in spite of you, and the game is only beginning. The game is only beginning. There is nothing for it, but to start the Terror. This announces the first day of the Terror. Port Burdock is no longer under the Queen, tell your Colonel of Police, and the rest of them; it is under me—the Terror! This is day one of year one of the new epoch—the Epoch of the Invisible Man. I am Invisible Man the First. To begin with the rule will be easy. The first day there will be one execution for the sake of example—a man named Kemp. Death starts for him to-day. He may lock himself away, hide himself away, get guards about him, put on armour if he likes—Death, the unseen Death, is coming. Let him take precautions; it will impress my people. Death starts from the pillar box by midday. The letter will fall in as the postman comes along, then off! The game begins. Death starts. Help him not, my people, lest Death fall upon you also. Today Kemp is to die.”

What is Coming? (1916)

“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.”

H. G. Wells libro L'uomo invisibile

Origine: The Invisible Man (1897), Chapter 27: The Seige of Kemp's House

“Oswald Cabal: Dragging out life to the last possible second is not living to the best effect. The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat. The best of life, Passworthy, lies nearest to the edge of death.”

H. G. Wells libro The Outline of History

Origine: The Outline of History (1920), Ch. 40

“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 libro The Shape of Things to Come

Things to Come (1936)

“The weaving of mankind into one community does not imply the creation of a homogeneous community, but rather the reverse; the welcome and adequate utilization of distinctive quality in an atmosphere of understanding… Communities all to one pattern, like boxes of toy soldiers, are things of the past, rather than of the future.”

H. G. Wells libro A Modern Utopia

Origine: A Modern Utopia (1905), Ch. 3, sect. 8

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

H. G. Wells libro The Outline of History

The Outline of History (1920)

“Our minds fall very readily under the spell of such unmitigated words as Purity and Chastity. Only death beyond decay, absolute non-existence, can be Pure and Chaste. Life is impurity, fact is impure. Everything has traces of alien matter; our very health is dependent on parasitic bacteria; the purest blood in the world has a tainted ancestor, and not a saint but has evil thoughts…. This stupidity, this unreasonable idealism of the common mind, fills life to-day with cruelties and exclusions, with partial suicides and secret shames. But we are born impure, we die impure; it is a fable that spotless white lilies sprang from any saint's decay, and the chastity of a monk or nun is but introverted impurity. We have to take life valiantly on these conditions and make such honour and beauty and sympathy out of our confusions, gather such constructive experience, as we may…. Life is that, and abstinence is for the most part a mere evasion of life.”

Attributed to Wells's book New Worlds for Old (1908) by Ferdinand Lundberg in Scoundrels All (1968), p. 126. The quote is widely repeated on the internet, but does not appear in the cited work.
Misattributed

“When the history of our civilization is written, it will be a biological history and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine.”

Origine: First and Last Things: A Confession of Faith and Rule of Life http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4225 (1908), Ch.3, section 20, Of Abstinences and Disciplines

“The more I thought it over, Kemp, the more I realised what a helpless absurdity an Invisible Man was—in a cold and dirty climate and a crowded civilised city. Before I made this mad experiment I had dreamt of a thousand advantages. That afternoon it seemed all disappointment. 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. Ambition—what is the good of pride of place when you cannot appear there? What is the good of the love of woman when her name must needs be Delilah? I have no taste for politics, for the blackguardisms of fame, for philanthropy, for sport. What was I to do? And for this I had become a wrapped-up mystery, a swathed and bandaged caricature of a man!”

1935 speech at Barber's Hall, London, included in Round the World for Birth Control (1937) edited by the Birth Control International Information Centre

“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 libro L'uomo invisibile

Origine: The Invisible Man (1897), Chapter 23: In Drury Lane

“Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of Being. Being, indeed! – there is no being, but a universal becoming of individualities, and Plato turned his back os truth when he turned towards his museum of specific ideals.”

H. G. Wells libro A Modern Utopia

Origine: A Modern Utopia (1905), Ch. 3, sect. 3