And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers - shriveled now, and brown and flat and brittle - to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of men.

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.

It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.

The character of the Open Conspiracy [the movement towards a world collective] will now be plainly displayed. It will have become a great world movement as widespread and evident as socialism or communism. It will largely have taken the place of these movements. It will be more, it will be a world religion.

It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble.

A biography should be a dissection and demonstration of how a particular human being was made and worked.

I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world