E. M. Forster Quotes
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Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden. It is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.
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The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.
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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.
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There is much good luck in the world, but it is luck. We are none of us safe. We are children, playing or quarrelling on the line.
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Tolerance is a very dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is negative. It merely means putting up with people, being able to stand things.
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Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
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I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper.
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Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!
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Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.
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The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.
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It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.
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At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes.
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The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power.
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Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
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A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.
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Two cheers for Democracy; one because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism.
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Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.
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Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.
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Adventures do occur, but not punctually.
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No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.
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Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.
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I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I'd like to be.
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Before the civil war, Pottibakia was a normal member of the Comity of Nations. She erected tariff walls, broke treaties, persecuted minorities, obstructed at conferences unless she was convinced there was no danger of a satisfactory solution; then she strained every nerve in the cause of peace.
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If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.