E. M. Forster Quotes
-
Love is always being given where it is not required.
-
The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
-
Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.
-
I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.
-
Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.
-
The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.
-
Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.
-
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 certainly an ought and not a must.
-
Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
-
Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
-
At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes.
-
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.
-
Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
-
Adventures do occur, but not punctually.
-
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.
-
Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.
-
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.
-
There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.
-
England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.
-
The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.
-
So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.
-
Unless we remember we cannot understand.
-
One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.