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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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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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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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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Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!
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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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The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.
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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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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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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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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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I'm a holy man minus the holiness.
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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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Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
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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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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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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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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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Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.
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No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.