E. M. Forster Quotes
-
Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.
-
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.
-
I'm a holy man minus the holiness.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.
-
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.
-
What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?
-
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
-
Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.
-
No one is India.
-
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.
-
We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.
-
Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.
-
The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.
-
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.
-
. . . life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t'other from which . . .
-
‘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.’
-
Naked I came into this world, naked I shall go out of it. And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its colour.
-
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
-
History develops, art stands still.
-
How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
-
We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.