E. M. Forster Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
I enjoy French poetry as well as French prose, and I believe that this land must have some cultural connection with the European continent, and that she is best connected through her spiritual complement across the Straits of Dover.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.
-
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!
-
The novelist, unlike many of his colleagues, makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself (roughly: niceties shallcome later), gives them names and sex, assigns them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of inverted commas, and perhaps to behave consistently.
-
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.
-
One can run away from women, turn them out, or give in to them. No fourth course.
-
They cared for no one, they were outside humanity, and death, had it come, would only have continued their pursuit of a retreating horizon.
-
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.
-
The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say "yesterday I was happy, today I am not.
-
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.
-
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.
-
This desire to govern a woman -- it lies very deep, and men and women must fight it together.... But I do love you surely in a better way then he does." He thought. "Yes -- really in a better way. I want you to have your own thoughts even when I hold you in my arms.
-
What the world most needs today are negative virtues - not minding people, not being huffy, touchy, irritable or revengeful.
-
Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
This solitude opressed her; she was accustomed to have her thoughts confirmed by others or, at all events, contradicted; it was too dreadful not to know whether she was thinking right or wrong.
-
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.