E. M. Forster Quotes
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America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for. It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large.
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Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.
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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.
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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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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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No one is India.
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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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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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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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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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Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.
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Peacefulness to be found in writing. Why do I not write every day? Partly because I feel I ought to write well and know I can't. But that is not a good enough reason for not writing, if it gains me poise & peace.
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We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.
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It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano. She was then no longer either deferential or patronizing; no longer either a rebel or a slave.
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This element of surprise or mystery the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called is of great importance in a plot.
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The story of the Fall always fascinates me as a play ground, but I cannot find any profound meaning in it, because of my 'liberal' view of human nature: I cannot believe in a state of original innocence, still less in a profound meaning in it, and I am always minimising the conception and the extent of Sin and the sinfulness of sex.
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Towns are after all excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.