Howards End Quotes

People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.

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, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven.

It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.

The present flowed by them like a stream. The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment. The moment had passed. The tree rustled again. Their senses were sharpened, and they seemed to apprehend life. Life passed. The tree rustled again.

Nature pulls one way and human nature another.

To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

All men are equal — all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas.

I find it very invigorating having Ken Lonergan, who's an established, Pulitzer-nominated playwright doing Howards End, or Chris Hampton who's won an Oscar writing a TV series, or having an actor like Mark Rylance, who is probably England's leading theater actor, in the lead in Wolf Hall.

I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.

Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown

Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer

They had nothing in common but the English language.

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.

What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?

I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.

Only connect!...Only connect the prose and the passion.

Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.

Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it.

The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken.

All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives? They have never entered into mine, but into yours, we thought--Haven't we all to struggle against life's daily greyness, against pettiness, against mechanical cheerfulness, against suspicion? I struggle by remembering my friends; others I have known by remembering some place--some beloved place or tree--we thought you one of these.

We live in the best of all possible worlds

She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

Life's very difficult and full of surprises. At all events, I've got as far as that. To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged - well, one can't do all these things at once, worse luck, because they're so contradictory. It's then that proportion comes in - to live by proportion. Don't begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed.

The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.

A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man.

Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return.

I believe we shall come to care about people less and less. The more people one knows the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London.

Was Mrs. Wilcox one of the unsatisfactory people- there are many of them- who dangle intimacy and then withdraw it? They evoke our interests and affections, and keep the life of the spirit dawdling around them. Then they withdraw. When physical passion is involved, there is a definite name for such behaviour- flirting- and if carried far enough, it is punishable by law. But no law- not public opinion, even- punishes those who coquette with friendship, though the dull ache that they inflict, the sense of misdirected effort and exhaustion, may be as intolerable. Was she one of these?