Quotes from book
The Island of Doctor Moreau

The Island of Doctor Moreau

The Island of Doctor Moreau is an 1896 science fiction novel by English author H. G. Wells. The text of the novel is the narration of Edward Prendick, a shipwrecked man rescued by a passing boat who is left on the island home of Doctor Moreau, a mad scientist who creates human-like hybrid beings from animals via vivisection. The novel deals with a number of philosophical themes, including pain and cruelty, moral responsibility, human identity, and human interference with nature. Wells described it as "an exercise in youthful blasphemy."The Island of Doctor Moreau is a classic of early science fiction and remains one of Wells' best-known books. The novel is the earliest depiction of the science fiction motif "uplift" in which a more advanced race intervenes in the evolution of an animal species to bring the latter to a higher level of intelligence. It has been adapted to film and other media on many occasions, with Charles Laughton , Burt Lancaster , and Marlon Brando as the mad doctor.


H. G. Wells photo
H. G. Wells photo
H. G. Wells photo
H. G. Wells photo

“He had developed in the most wonderful way the distinctive silliness of man without losing one jot of the natural folly of a monkey.”

Source: The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Ch. 21: The Reversion of the Beast Folk

H. G. Wells photo
H. G. Wells photo

“An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.”

Source: The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Ch. 21: The Reversion of the Beast Folk

H. G. Wells photo

“There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven.”

Source: The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Ch. 22: The Man Alone
Context: There is, though 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.

H. G. Wells photo

“The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature.”

Source: The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), Ch. 14: Doctor Moreau Explains
Context: To this day I have never troubled about the ethics of the matter. The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature.

H. G. Wells photo
H. G. Wells photo
H. G. Wells photo
H. G. Wells photo

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