Howards End Quotes
"To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it."
"It is as if the splendour of life might boil over and waste to steam and froth."
"It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile."
"The very chairs on which they sat would have seen to that."
"A hint of the truth broke on him after Sedan, when he saw the dyed moustaches of Napoleon going grey."
"He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things."
"Music is in a very serious state just now, though extraordinarily interesting."
"It's better to be fooled than to be suspicious—that the confidence trick is the work of man, but the want-of-confidence trick is the work of the devil."
"We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet."
"I think it's affectation to compare the Oder to music, and so do you, but the over-hanging warehouses of Stettin take beauty seriously, which we don't, and the average Englishman doesn't, and despises all who do."
"The only things that matter are the things that interest one. Bowing, even calling and leaving cards, even a dinner-party—we can do all those things to the Wilcoxes, if they find it agreeable; but the other thing, the one important thing—never again."
"It is private life that holds out the mirror to infinity; personal intercourse, and that alone, that ever hints at a personality beyond our daily vision."
"Money pads the edges of things. God help those who have none."
"It is only the occasion of it that struck her with amazement annually. How many of these vacillating shoppers and tired shop-assistants realized that it was a divine event that drew them together?"
"My husband feels it particularly hard that they should be treated like road-hogs."
"I believe that in the last century men have developed the desire for work, and they must not starve it."
"It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die—neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave."
"Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead nowhere."
"The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains."
"Our business is not to contrast the unseen with the seen, but to reconcile them."
"It's a new desire. It goes with a great deal that’s bad, but in itself it’s good."
"Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can pursue."
"How dare Schlegels despise Wilcoxes, when it takes all sorts to make a world?"
"Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe."
"The imagination ought to play upon money and realize it vividly, for it’s the second most important thing in the world."
"Life is a deep, deep river, death a blue sky, life was a house, death a wisp of hay, a flower, a tower, life and death were anything and everything, except this ordered insanity."
"Science explained people, but could not understand them."
"Differences—eternal differences, planted by God in a single family, so that there may always be colour; sorrow perhaps, but colour in the daily grey."
"I can play with their beauty and charm, but that is all—nothing real, not one scrap of what there ought to be."
"Because a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong for ever."
"This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilization that won't be a movement, because it will rest on the earth."
"All over the world men and women are worrying because they cannot develop as they are supposed to develop."
"It was no fun doing errands for his father, who was never quite satisfied."
"I think we might have had the whole establishment, piccaninnies included."
"He would grow into a rich, jolly old man, at times a little sentimental about women, but emptying his glass with anyone."