H. G. Wells Quotes

The world is a dangerous place to live

I could have told him that nothing was safe and that no matter how careful you were and how hard you tried, there were still accidents, hidden traps, and snares. You could get killed on an airplane or crossing the street. Your marriage could fall apart when you weren't looking; your husband could lose his job; our baby could get sick or die.

Nothing in the world causes so much misery as uncertainty.

Fondness for people can be terrifying, because it's intangible and it can disappear, or it can be taken away, or you can say the wrong thing. A million things, so it's so uncomfortable. So when you suddenly become aware of it because they don't call you or something for half an hour or whatever, you lose it.

No one ever said life was fair. Just Eventful.

I was also ready to believe, though, that whatever good things I had managed to set upright could topple at any second.

The world is fine. Our place on it is precarious.

Real life seems to have no plots.

I lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire. It was the sort of knowledge that kept you on your toes.

We are in a position similar to that of a mountaineer who is wandering over uncharted spaces, and never knows whether behind the peak which he sees in front of him and which he tries to scale there may not be another peak still beyond and higher up.

Security is elusive. It's impossible. We all die. We all get old. We all get sick. People leave us. People change us. Nothing is secure.

Bad things can happen to anyone at any time, whether you follow the rules or not.

But as the unthought-on accident is guilty To what we wildly do, so we profess Ourselves to be the slaves of chance, and flies Of every wind that blows.

A reasonable probability is the only certainty.

It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will do; but, not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse.

But it there's anything I've learned in the past few months, it's that the only thing that's certain in life is that nothing in life is certain.

History admits no rules; only outcomes.

The unexpected has happened so continually in my life that it has ceased to deserve the name.

The camera guys can't mess up. God bless them, they hardly ever do. But they literally don't know what's going to happen next. None of us do. And it all has to come together and be funny.

Fate rarely calls upon us at a moment of our choosing.

I know that truly nothing is for sure.

You never know what's coming for you.

Me? I stand for uncertainty, insecurity, bad taste, fun, and things that go boom in the night.

Normal, in our house, is like a blanket too short for a bed--sometimes it covers you just fine, and other times it leaves you cold and shaking; and worst of all, you never know which of the two it's going to be.

If God resides anywhere ... surely he shelters behind barricades of pure chance.