Herbert G Wells - Collected Quotes

"Science is a match that man has just got alight. He thought he was in a room - in moments of devotion, a temple - and that his light would be reflected from and display walls inscribed with wonderful secrets and pillars carved with philosophical systems wrought into harmony. It is a curious sensation, now that the preliminary splutter is over and the flame burns up clear, to see his hands and just a glimpse of himself and the patch he stands on visible, and around him, in place of all that human comfort and beauty he anticipated - darkness still." (Herbert G Wells, "The Rediscovery of the Unique", The Fortnightly Review, 1891)

"Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change." (Herbert G Wells, "The Time Machine", 1895)

"Until a scientific theory yields confident forecasts you know it is unsound and tentative; it is mere theorizing, as evanescent as art talk or the phantoms politicians talk about." (Herbert G Wells, [Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution] 1902)

"Facts are the raw materials and not the substance of science." (Herbert G Wells, "The Discovery of the Future", 1902)

"The great body of physical science, a great deal of the essential fact of financial science, and endless social and political problems are only accessible and only thinkable to those who have had a sound training in mathematical analysis, and the time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex world-wide States that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write." (Herbert G Wells, "Mankind in the Making", 1903)

"The new mathematics is a sort of supplement to language, affording a means of thought about form and quantity and a means of expression, more exact, compact, and ready than ordinary language." (Herbert G Wells, "Mankind in the Making", 1904)

"The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it." (Herbert G Wells, "Scepticism of the Instrument: A Modern Utopia", 1905)

"When the mind grapples with a great and intricate problem, it makes its advances step by step, with but little realization of the gains it has made, until suddenly, with an effect of abrupt illumination, it realizes its victory." (Herbert G Wells, "A Short History of the World", 1922)

"Behind the adventurer, the speculator, comes that scavenger of adventurers, the statistician. […] The movement of the last hundred years is all in favor of the statistician." (Herbert G Wells, "The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind", 1931)

"Nothing destroys the powers of general observation quite so much as a life of experimental science." (Herbert G Wells)

"The popular idea of scientific investigation is a vehement, aimless collection of little facts, collected as a bower bird collects shells and pebbles, in methodical little rows, and out of this process, in some manner unknown to the popular mind, certain conjuring tricks - the celebrated 'wonders of science' - in a sort of accidental way emerge. ." (Herbert G Wells)

"You know of course that a mathematical line, a line of thickness nil, has no real existence. They taught you that? Neither has a mathematical plane. These things are mere abstractions." (Herbert G Wells)