90 quotes
There's enough sorrow in the world, isn't there, without trying to invent it.
A Room with a View (1908)
Axiom: Novel must have either one living character or a perfect pattern: fails otherwise.
Commonplace Book (1985)
A humanist has four leading characteristics — curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.
Two Cheers for Democracy (1951)
Science, when applied to personal relationships, is always just wrong.
Selected Letters (1983)
Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wants to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.
Commonplace Book (1985)
Happiness in the ordinary sense is not what one needs in life, though one is right to aim at it. The true satisfaction is to come through and see those whom one loves come through.
Selected Letters (1983)
It is so difficult – at least, I find it difficult – to understand people who speak the truth.
A Room with a View (1908)
The humanist has four leading characteristics - curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.
Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
Howards End (1910)
Self-pity? I see no moral objections to it, the smell drives people away, but that's a practical objection, and occasionally an advantage.
Commonplace Book (1985)
Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.
Howards End (1910)
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.
Howards End (1910)
Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.
A Room with a View (1908)
One can run away from women, turn them out, or give in to them. No fourth course.
Commonplace Book (1985)
This woman was a goddess to the end. For her no love could be degrading: she stood outside all degradation.
Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905)
Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.
Two Cheers for Democracy (1951)
It is those who cannot connect who hasten to cast the first stone.
Howards End (1910)
Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.
Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.
No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.
The Longest Journey (1907)