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.

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.

There is no reason whatever to believe that the order of nature has any greater bias in favour of man than it had in favour of the ichthyosaur or the pterodactyl.

If your life doesn't end in failure, you haven't reached high enough. So it was failure I had to achieve.

Endless conflicts. Endless misunderstanding. All life is that. Great and little cannot understand one another.

Things that would have made fame of a less clever man seemed tricks in his hands. It is a mistake to do things too easily.

The man was running away with the rest, and selling his papers for a shilling each as he ran—a grotesque mingling of profit and panic.