Frases de Herbert George Wells

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“Vai chegar um momento no dia em que você já escreveu suas páginas pela manhã, respondeu a sua correspondência à tarde, e não tem mais nada para fazer. Então chega aquela hora que você fica entediado; esta é a hora para o sexo.”

“Crime e vidas ruins são a medida da falha do Estado, todo crime no final é o crime da comunidade.”

“O serpear da humanidade numa só comunidade não implica a criação de uma comunidade homogênea, mas o contrário; a utilização bem-vinda e adequada da qualidade distintiva numa atmosfera de entendimento… Comunidades com um só padrão, como caixas de soldados de brinquedo, são coisas do passado, do que do futuro.”

“A indignação moral é a inveja com uma auréola.”

“Os quatro Evangelhos, todos eles, dão-nos o retrato de uma personalidade muito definida, obrigando-nos a dizer: Esse homem existiu. Isso não pode ser inventado.”

“A história do mundo é, essencialmente, história de idéias.”

“Trata-se duma fantasia em escala astronomica sobre a futura humanidade, uma sinistra mistura de biologia e satira. O autor vê uma especie humana, depois de terriveis guerras, unificando-se afinal, sob o controle americano, em forma dum estado mundial - um estado ao tipo plutocratico que sofre uma incrivel degeneração moral e intelectual e desfecha numa nova Idade Media. O Homo sapiens é então exterminado pela catastrofe por ele mesmo provocada, e apenas uns tantos individuos sobrevivem obscuramente para se tornarem os progenitores de duas especies de Homo em conflito que imediatamente começam a propagar-se. As mais remotas especulações de Stapledon sobre a sucessão dos ultimos Hominideos e sua final extinção muito vivas e curiosas, não cabem, entretanto, aqui. Mas o livro estabelece a probabilidde da falencia da civilização contemporanea no barrar a guerra e evitar a catastrofe economica.”

“Em terra de cegos, quem tem um olho é rei.”

“Se você caiu ontem, fique de pé hoje.”

“Em todo o mundo da Utopia não ha carne. Antes havia. Mas agora não conseguimos suportar a ideia de matadouros. E numa população em que toda a gente é culta e como um nível de aperfeiçoamento físico semelhante, é praticamente impossível encontrar alguém que vá talhar um boi ou um porco morto. Nunca nos acostumamos com a questão higiénica do consumo de carne. Esse outro aspecto fez-nos decidir. Ainda me consigo lembrar, de quando era rapaz, do contentamento que o encerramento do ultimo matadouro gerou.”

“Um tempo quando todas as coisas boas serão para todos homens pode estar mais perto do que pensamos. Cada um que acredita que traz o bom tempo mais perto; cada coração que falha o atrasa.”

“A nossa verdadeira nacionalidade é a humanidade.”

“História humana na essência é história das idéias.”

“Quando aprendes alguma coisa, ao princípio sentes sempre que perdeste algo.”

“A crise de hoje é a anedota de amanhã.”

“Os ideais são o trajo de gala da alma.”

“O que realmente importa é o que fazes com o que tens.”

“Publicidade é mentira legalizada.”

“O amor é a coisa maior de todas, muito mais do que a própria fama.”

“A história da humanidade torna-se cada vez mais uma corrida entre a educação e a catástrofe.”

“Não acredito ter qualquer imortalidade. O maior mal no mundo, hoje, é a religião cristã.”

“Se ontem te sentiste caído, hoje é o dia para te levantares.”

“Sempre que vejo um adulto de bicicleta, volto a confiar no futuro da raça humana.”

“Não devemos permitir que o relógio e o calendário nos ceguem para o fato de que cada momento da vida é um milagre e um mistério.”

“O adultério é justificável: a alma necessita de poucas coisas; o corpo, muitas.”

“Brincar com o fogo desenvolve em nós a habilidade de não nos queimarmos.”

“Se não acabarmos com a guerra, a guerra acabará connosco.”

“Os crimes e as más vidas dão-nos a medida do fracasso de um Estado. Todos os crimes são, afinal, o crime de uma comunidade.”

“O caminho com menos obstáculos é o caminho do perdedor.”

“A grandeza de homem pode ser medida por “Aquilo que ele deixa para crescer, e se ele introduziu uma nova mentalidade com a certeza que perdurou após ele”. A julgar por este teste, Jesus ocupa o primeiro lugar.”

“Mr. Duff Cooper, landing at New York, cools his mind by blowing off about a forthcoming revolt of the German Army and a return to monarchy in Germany, a Holy Roman Empire, I suppose, leading that new Crusade of which the Pope has been talking about recent against anti-God Russia. But quite a lot of radical people in the world, in spite of the folly, stupidity and brutality of the Stalin–Molotov attack on Finland, are averse from this idea of a religious war against Socialism and Atheism.”

“The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary government asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no decisive action.”

“Marguerite, joyfully: “We are ourselves, my dear, we are ourselves. Well never be anyone else.””

“Cynicism is humour in ill health.”

“Pippa' Passworthy: This little upset across the water doesn’t mean anything. Threatened men live long and threatened wars never occur.”

“If his thinking has been sound, then this world is at the end of its tether. The end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded.”

“In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen rampart and stood upon its crest, and the interior of the redoubt was below me. A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it, huge mounds of material and strange shelter places. And scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians—dead!—slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.”

“The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is or has been is but the twilight of the dawn.”

“These are the rights of all human beings. They are yours wherever you are. Demand that your rulers and politicians sign and observe this declaration. If they refuse, if they quibble, they can have no place in the new free world that dawns upon mankind.”

“One of the darkest evils of our world is surely the unteachable wildness of the Good.”

“Most striking, perhaps, in their general appearance was the disproportion between the legs of these creatures and the length of their bodies; and yet — so relative is our idea of grace — my eye became habituated to their forms, and at last I even fell in with their persuasion that my own long thighs were ungainly.”

“…there has accumulated a vast tangle of emergency legislation, regulations, barriers and restraints, out of all proportion to and often missing and distorting the needs of the situation. For the restoration and modernisation of human civilization, this exaggerated outlawing of the fellow citizen whom we see fit to suspect as a traitor or revolutionary and also of the stranger within our gates, has to be restrained and brought back within the scheme of human rights.”

“I hate and despise a shrewish suspicion of foreigners and foreign ways; a man who can look me in the face, laugh with me, speak truth and deal fairly, is my brother, though his skin is as black as ink or as yellow as an evening primrose.”

“You have been amazingly energetic and clever," this letter ran, "though what you stand to gain by it I cannot imagine. You are against me. For a whole day you have chased me; you have tried to rob me of a night's rest. But I have had food in spite of you, I have slept in spite of you, and the game is only beginning. The game is only beginning. There is nothing for it, but to start the Terror. This announces the first day of the Terror. Port Burdock is no longer under the Queen, tell your Colonel of Police, and the rest of them; it is under me—the Terror! This is day one of year one of the new epoch—the Epoch of the Invisible Man. I am Invisible Man the First. To begin with the rule will be easy. The first day there will be one execution for the sake of example—a man named Kemp. Death starts for him to-day. He may lock himself away, hide himself away, get guards about him, put on armour if he likes—Death, the unseen Death, is coming. Let him take precautions; it will impress my people. Death starts from the pillar box by midday. The letter will fall in as the postman comes along, then off! The game begins. Death starts. Help him not, my people, lest Death fall upon you also. Today Kemp is to die.”

“Every one of these hundreds of millions of human beings is in some form seeking happiness…Not one is altogether noble nor altogether trustworthy nor altogether consistent; and not one is altogether vile…Not a single one but has at some time wept.”

“Oswald Cabal: Dragging out life to the last possible second is not living to the best effect. The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat. The best of life, Passworthy, lies nearest to the edge of death.”

“There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.”

“The weaving of mankind into one community does not imply the creation of a homogeneous community, but rather the reverse; the welcome and adequate utilization of distinctive quality in an atmosphere of understanding… Communities all to one pattern, like boxes of toy soldiers, are things of the past, rather than of the future.”

“In politics, strangely enough, the best way to play your cards is to lay them face upwards on the table.”

“Our minds fall very readily under the spell of such unmitigated words as Purity and Chastity. Only death beyond decay, absolute non-existence, can be Pure and Chaste. Life is impurity, fact is impure. Everything has traces of alien matter; our very health is dependent on parasitic bacteria; the purest blood in the world has a tainted ancestor, and not a saint but has evil thoughts…. This stupidity, this unreasonable idealism of the common mind, fills life to-day with cruelties and exclusions, with partial suicides and secret shames. But we are born impure, we die impure; it is a fable that spotless white lilies sprang from any saint's decay, and the chastity of a monk or nun is but introverted impurity. We have to take life valiantly on these conditions and make such honour and beauty and sympathy out of our confusions, gather such constructive experience, as we may…. Life is that, and abstinence is for the most part a mere evasion of life.”

“When the history of our civilization is written, it will be a biological history and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine.”

“The more I thought it over, Kemp, the more I realised what a helpless absurdity an Invisible Man was—in a cold and dirty climate and a crowded civilised city. Before I made this mad experiment I had dreamt of a thousand advantages. That afternoon it seemed all disappointment. I went over the heads of the things a man reckons desirable. No doubt invisibility made it possible to get them, but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they are got. Ambition—what is the good of pride of place when you cannot appear there? What is the good of the love of woman when her name must needs be Delilah? I have no taste for politics, for the blackguardisms of fame, for philanthropy, for sport. What was I to do? And for this I had become a wrapped-up mystery, a swathed and bandaged caricature of a man!”

“The science hangs like a gathering fog in a valley, a fog which begins nowhere and goes nowhere, an incidental, unmeaning inconvenience to passers-by.”

“Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of Being. Being, indeed! – there is no being, but a universal becoming of individualities, and Plato turned his back os truth when he turned towards his museum of specific ideals.”

“Mankind which began in a cave and behind a windbreak will end in the disease-soaked ruins of a slum.”

“"Pull yourself together," said the Voice, "for you have to do the job I've chosen for you."Mr. Marvel blew out his cheeks, and his eyes were round."I've chosen you," said the Voice. "You are the only man except some of those fools down there, who knows there is such a thing as an invisible man. You have to be my helper. Help me—and I will do great things for you. An invisible man is a man of power."”

“The crisis of yesterday is the joke of to-morrow.”

“Now I am prepared to maintain," said Chaffery, proceeding with his proposition, "that Honesty is essentially an anarchistic and disintegrating force in society, that communities are held together and the progress of civilisation made possible only by vigorous and sometimes even violent Lying; that the Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry … Were I not of a profoundly indolent, restless, adventurous nature, and horribly averse to writing, I would make a great book of this and live honored by every profound duffer in the world.”

“In all the round world of Utopia there is no meat. There used to be. But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughter-houses. And, in a population that is all educated, and at about the same level of physical refinement, it is practically impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig. We never settled the hygienic question of meat-eating at all. This other aspect decided us. I can still remember, as a boy, the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughter-house.”