Quotes by H. G. Wells

“If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.”

“My idea of love was a cheerful, natural reciprocity of help and pleasuring and a certain mutual flattery and reassurance — with no thought or possibility of third parties intervening from either side of the picture. Love, if it was any good at all, was an honest alliance of two people well suited to each other, against the impertinence of third parties. With laughter in it. So I thought. So I suppose I still think at the back of my mind. And still I do not know why we should not all of us pair off in that spirit. Few men and women, I realize, succeed in getting things like that. But surely some do.”

“I am, I repeat, quite unable to say now whether I was what is called 'in love' with her. But then I have never been able to determine what 'in love' really means.”

“I emerged from the affair at last in a state which I can only describe as over-disillusionment about love.”

“My life has been an affair of bright stars and interruptions and I know now surely that it can never escape from these fluctuations. It is a hybrid life, torn in opposite directions.”

“It was Foxfield who said to me once that conscious life was 'the thinnest and flimsiest of pellicules, strained midway between the atoms and the stars'. Our personalities are by nature and necessity superficial. And incidental. The very saints nod and forget. Our superficiality and incidentalness seem to be inescapable. There is no coherent plot for the personal life; there may be no coherent plot for the whole. That too, like the ego, may be a delusive simplification. And yet there is something real going on, something not ourselves that goes on, in spite of our interpretations and misconceptions. That ultimate reality behind the curtains may be fundamentally and irresolvably multiple and intricate and inexplicable, but it goes on. It may be altogether incomprehensible to our utmost faculties, but it is there. And in some partial and elusive way we are not simply borne along by that, but we belong. We do not happen to exist. It is, for inexplicable reasons, our business to exist.”

“Happiness is the manifest rule of life.”