E. M. Forster Quotes
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I'm a holy man minus the holiness.
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Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.
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If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting--both for us and for her.
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The woman who can't influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself.
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Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.
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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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The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.
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It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.
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One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.
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Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.
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It is impossible to foretell the future with any degree of accuracy, that it is impossible to rehearse life. A fault in the scenery, a face in the audience, an interruption of the audience on to the stage, and all our carefully planned gesture mean nothing, or mean too much.
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For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.
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One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
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To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.
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If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.
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We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.
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The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.
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One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.
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Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
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At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
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The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.
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Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
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Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.
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I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.