E. M. Forster Quotes
-
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
-
What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?
-
Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.
-
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.
-
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.
-
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.
-
No one is India.
-
One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.
-
I'm a holy man minus the holiness.
-
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.
-
One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.
-
We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.
-
Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.
-
Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.
-
. . . life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t'other from which . . .
-
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.
-
The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.
-
History develops, art stands still.
-
‘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.’
-
Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.
-
How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
-
We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.
-
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
-
Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.