E. M. Forster Quotes
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It isn’t possible to love and to part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know from experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
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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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Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due - she reminds us too much of a prima donna.
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Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.
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There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.
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Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.
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What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?
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Love felt and returned, love which our bodies exact and our hearts have transfigured, love which is the most real thing that we shall ever meet, reappeared now as the world's enemy, and she must stifle it.
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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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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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It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why history is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead.
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No one is India.
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We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
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Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.
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Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.
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We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.
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History develops, art stands still.
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All invitations must proceed from heaven perhaps; perhaps it is futile for men to initiate their own unity, they do but widen the gulfs between them by the attempt.
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Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.
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The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.
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. . . life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t'other from which . . .
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‘Why are pictures like this allowed?’ he suddenly cried. He had stopped in front of a colonial print in which the martyrdom of St Agatha was depicted with all the fervour that incompetence could command.‘It’s only a saint,’ said Lady Peaslake, placidly raising her head.‘How disgusting – and how ugly’‘Yes, very. It’s Roman Catholic.’
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Pain is good, I'd say, when it's incidental to Love. In 'I give up my life for my friend' it is my friend, not my death, that matters. And sometimes I needn't give up my life for him, I can live for him, and with him, and the power of the spirit is then equally manifested, I should think.
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We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.