E. M. Forster Quotes
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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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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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Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.
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Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.
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I'm a holy man minus the holiness.
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It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.
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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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The woman who can't influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself.
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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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One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
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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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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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The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.
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Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.
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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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Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
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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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At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
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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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Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
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Your letter firmed me up a lot. It certainly is a comfort to know that my work is respected by someone whom I respect and am as fond as you. It confirms my beliefe that life is notall nonsense and cruelty-the inversion of Victorian complacency-but has hard spots of sense and love bobbing about in it here and there.
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I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.