E. M. Forster Quotes
-
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
-
England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.
-
One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions.
-
But it struck him that people are not really dead until they are felt to be dead. As long as there is some misunderstanding about them, they possess a sort of immortality.
-
The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.
-
Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's.
-
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.
-
The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.
-
Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.
-
The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.
-
I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.
-
Love is always being given where it is not required.
-
Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
-
I never could get on with representative individuals but people who existed on their own account and with whom it might therefore be possible to be friends.
-
Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.
-
So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.
-
Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.
-
The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
-
Unless we remember we cannot understand.
-
There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.
-
Reverence is fatal to literature.
-
The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance.
-
Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.
-
I am certainly an ought and not a must.