Quotes on Wells

It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.

If a man called Christmas Day a mere hypocritical excuse for drunkenness and gluttony, that would be false, but it would have a fact hidden in it somewhere. But when Bernard Shaw says the Christmas Day is only a conspiracy kept up by poulterers and wine merchants from strictly business motives, then he says something which is not so much false as startling and arrestingly foolish. He might as well say that the two sexes were invented by jewellers who wanted to sell wedding rings.

Unfortunately, the boards of art institutions tend to be populated with well-meaning supporters of the arts who often lack any business background or appetite for imposing appropriate discipline.

I realize full well how hard it must be to go on living alone in a place from which someone has left you, but there is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.

All she saw, down in the cellar well beneath the stoop, was a light yellow feather with a tip of green. And she had never named him. Had called him "my parrot" all these years. "My parrot." "Love you. "Love you." Did the dogs get him? Or did he get the message - that she said, "My parrot" and he said, "Love you," and she had never said it back or even taken the trouble to name him - and manage somehow to fly away on wings that had not soared for six years.

Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.

Who you get, and how it works out - there's so much luck involved, as well as the million branching consequences of your conscious choice of a mate, that no one and no amount of talking can untangle it if it turns out unhappily.

Of the seven days God gave to us in a week, He said to take six, and use them for our business. Yet we think that we must have the seventh as well. It is like someone who, while traveling, comes upon a poor man in distress. Having but seven shillings, the generous person gives the poor man six, but when the wretch scrambles to his feet, he follows his benefactor to knock him down and steal the seventh shilling from him.

When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

Blest are those Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled, That they are not a pipe for fortune's finger To sound what stop she please.

The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if it were.

If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.

We're terrible animals. I think that the Earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should.

Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are.

Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love. I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.

A book is a loaded gun in the house next door...Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?

May I share with you a formula that in my judgment will help you and help me to journey well through mortality... First, fill your mind with truth; second, fill your life with service; and third, fill your heart with love.

Mr. Rochester, I no more assign this fate to you than I grasp at it for myself. We were born to strive and endure - you as well as I: do so. You will forget me before I forget you.

I don't know yet what I am capable of doing, but, by God, I have genius -- I know it too well to blush behind it.

People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it's impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they'll keep writing and you'll have hanged yourself.

Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading -- once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive -- is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.