It is not much good thinking of a thing unless you think it out.
If there is no God, nothing matters. If there is a God, nothing else matters.
For all my desire to be interesting, I have to confess that for most things and people I don’t give a damn.
But I was too restless to watch long; I’m too Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours – that’s another matter.
Few people realise the immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the material universe swims.
By this time I was no longer very much terrified or very miserable. I had, as it were, passed the limit of terror and despair. I felt now that my life was practically lost, and that persuasion made me capable of daring anything.
I never yet heard of a useless thing that was not ground out of existence by evolution sooner or later. Did you? And pain gets needless.
Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life.
It’s no use locking the door after the steed is stolen.
The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary government asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no decisive action.
The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature.
Alone – it is wonderful how little a man can do alone! To rob a little, to hurt a little, and there is the end.
Very much indeed of what we call moral education is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion.
We will peck them to death to-morrow, my dear.
It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.
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.
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.
Patriotism has become a mere national self assertion, a sentimentality of flag-cheering with no constructive duties.
In the scientific world I find just that disinterested devotion to great ends that I hope will spread at last through the entire range of human activity.
Science has toiled too long forging weapons for fools to use. It is time she held her hand.