E. M. Forster Quotes
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I am certainly an ought and not a must.
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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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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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Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
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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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Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!
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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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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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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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At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes.
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Two cheers for Democracy; one because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism.
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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.
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Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
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I'm a holy man minus the holiness.
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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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Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.
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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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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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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.
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No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.
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Adventures do occur, but not punctually.