Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.
H. G. WellsRead
If only I had thought of a Kodak! I could have flashed that glimpse of the Under-world in a second, and examined it at leisure.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the desire to capture fleeting moments of insight and explore deeper dimensions of reality.
H. G. Wells expresses a longing for a tool that could instantaneously capture and allow for later examination of profound insights into the nature of existence. The metaphor of a Kodak symbolizes the wish to document and reflect on the hidden aspects of life, hinting at the complexities of our understanding of reality.
In practice
In a presentation on life’s mysteries, one could use this quote to emphasize the value of capturing moments of revelation.
Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.
He spares no resource in telling of his dead inventions... Bare verbs he rarely tolerates. He splits infinitives and fills them up with adverbial stuffing. He presses the passing colloquialism into his service. His vast paragraphis sweat and struggle; the
It [a new world order] needs only that the governments of Britain, the United States, France, Germany, and Russia should get together in order to set up an effective control of currency, credit, production, and distribution – that is to say, an effective ‘dictatorship of prosperity,’ for the whole world. The other sixty odd States would have to join in or accommodate themselves to the over-ruling decisions of these major Powers.
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.
But I was too restless to watch long; I'm too Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours - that's another matter.
The greatest task of democracy, its ritual and feast - is choice.
So, I looked up, and we were in this giant dome like a glass snowball, and Mark said that the amazing white stars were really only holes in the black glass of the dome, and when you went to heaven, the glass broke away, and there was nothing but a whole sheet of star white, which is brighter than anything but doesn't hurt your eyes. It was vast and open and thinly quiet, and I felt so small.
I sometimes think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm.
By obliging men to turn their attention to other affairs than their own, it rubs off that private selfishness which is the rust of society.
We all suffer under a curse, the curse that we know more than we can endure, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing we can do about the force and the lure of this knowledge.
No man is such a conqueror, as the one that has defeated himself.
Whether people be of high or low birth, rich or poor, old or young, enlightened or confused, they are all alike in that they will one day die.
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