The Island of Dr. Moreau - H.G. Wells

• I could have stood it well enough. It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us. But in spite of the brilliant sunlight and the green fans of the trees waving in the soothing sea-breeze, the world was confusion, blurred with drifting black and red phantasm, until I was out of earshot of the house in the stone wall.

• I might just as well have worked to from sheep into llamas, and llamas into sheep. I suppose there is something in the human form that appeals to the artistic turn of mind more powerfully than any animal shape can. But I’ve not confined myself to man-making. Once or twice…”

• So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick, so long as your own pains drive you, so long, I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a little less obscurely what an animal feels. This pain-----"

• A mind truly opened to what science has to each must see that it is a little thing. It may be that save in this little planet, this speck of cosmic dust, invisible long before the nearest star could be attained—it may be, I say, that nowhere else does this thing called pain occur. But the laws we feel our way towards… Why, even on this earth, even among living things, what pain is there?

• “Then I am a religious man, Pendick, as every sane man must be. It may be I fancy I have seen more of the ways of this world’s Maker than you—for I have sought his laws, in my way, all my life, while you, I understand have been collecting butterflies. And I tell you, pleasure and pain have nothing to do with heaven and hell. Pleasure and pain—Bah! What is your theologian’s ecstasy but Mahomet’s hour in the dark? This store men and women set on pleasure and pain, Prendick, is the mark of the beast upon them, the mark of the beast from which they came. Pain! Pain and pleasure – they are for us, only so long as we wriggle in the dust….

• There is, thought I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope. I hope, or I could not live.