E. M. Forster Quotes
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At times our need for a sympathetic gesture is so great that we care not what exactly it signifies or how much we may have to pay for it afterwards.
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No disease of the imagination is so difficult to cure, as that which is complicated with the dread of guilt: fancy and conscience then act interchangeably upon us, and so often shift their places, that the illusions of one are not distinguished from the dictates of the other.
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I haven't made my point yet, which is that it is right to be kind and even sacrifice ourselves to people who need kindness and lie in our way - otherwise, besides failing to help them, we run into the aridity of self-development. To seek for recipients of one's goodness, to play the Potted Jesus leads to the contrary the Christian danger.
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Then she lay on her back and gazed at the cloudless sky. Mr. Beebe, whose opinion of her rose daily, whispered to his niece that that was the proper way to behave if any little thing went wrong.
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I only wish the poets would say this too: love is of the body; not the body, but of the the body. Ah! the misery that would be saved if we confessed that! Ah! for a little directness to liberate the soul!
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Just as words have two functions - information and creation - so each human mind has two personalities, one on the surface, one deeper down. The upper personality... is conscious and alert... The lower personality is a... perfect fool, but without it there is no literature.
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As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take the examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one be a penny the stupider.
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They cared for no one, they were outside humanity, and death, had it come, would only have continued their pursuit of a retreating horizon.
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Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time - beautiful?
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An efficiency-regime cannot be run without a few heroes stuck about it to carry off the dullness - much as plums have to be put into bad pudding to make it palatable.
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He doesn't want you to be real, and to think and to live. He doesn't love you. But I love you. I want you to have your own thoughts and ideas and feelings, even when I hold you in my arms.
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When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else. Blessed are the uneducated, who forget it entirely, and are never conscious of folly or pruriency in the past, of long aimless conversations.
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Do you suppose there's any difference between spring in nature and spring in man? But there we go, praising the one and condemning the other as improper, ashamed that the same laws work eternally through both.
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One can run away from women, turn them out, or give in to them. No fourth course.
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I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.
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I have said that each aspect of the novel demands a different quality of the reader. Well, the prophetic aspect demands two qualities: humility and the suspension of the sense of humour.
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What the world most needs today are negative virtues - not minding people, not being huffy, touchy, irritable or revengeful.
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All that is observable in a man-that is to say his actions and such of his spiritual existence as can be deduced from his actions-falls into the domain of history.
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Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.
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Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership.
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At the moment they vanished they were everywhere, the cool benediction of the night descended, the stars sparkled, and the whole universe was a hill.
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Self-pity? I see no moral objections to it, the smell drives people away, but that's a practical objection, and occasionally an advantage.
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You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other. "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but not everything.
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A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man.