E. m. forster quotes

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

It was not that ladies were inferior to men; it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself she would be first censured, then despised, and finally ignored.

Love is always being given where it is not required.

No one is more triumphant than the man who chooses a worthy subject and masters all its facts.

I cannot help thinking that there is something to admire in everyone, even if you do not approve of them.

Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown

It is impossible to foretell the future with any degree of accuracy, that it is impossible to rehearse life. A fault in the scenery, a face in the audience, an interruption of the audience on to the stage, and all our carefully planned gesture mean nothing, or mean too much.

But it struck him that people are not really dead until they are felt to be dead. As long as there is some misunderstanding about them, they possess a sort of immortality.

Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's.

Like all her friends, I miss her greatly...But...I am sure there is no case for lamentation...Virginia Woolf got through an immense amount of work, she gave acute pleasure in new ways, she pushed the light of the English language a little further against darkness. Those are facts.

Man can learn everything if he will but try.

...the true spirit of gastronomic joylessness. Porridge fills the Englishman up, and prunes clear him out.

Don't be mysterious; there isn't the time.

Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.

She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position; it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship.

At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.

The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.

One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.

But the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable.

One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.

I think you’re beautiful, the only beautiful person I’ve ever seen. I love your voice and everything to do with you, down to your clothes or the room you are sitting in. I adore you.

For it is a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.

There are moments when the inner life actually 'pays,' when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.

Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all... My lawgivers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul. My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in the Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is 'Lord, I disbelieve - help thou my unbelief.

It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons. It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and, close below, Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road.

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.

It makes a difference doesn't it, whether we fully fence ourselves in, or whether we are fenced out by the barriers of others?

Aziz winked at him slowly and said: “...There are many ways of being a man; mine is to express what is deepest in my heart.

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West.

One has two duties - to be worried and not to be worried.

People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.

How can I know what I think till I see what I say?

She had been so wicked that in all her life she had done only one good deed-given an onion to a beggar. So she went to hell. As she lay in torment she saw the onion, lowered down from heaven by an angel. She caught hold of it. He began to pull her up. The other damned saw what was happening and caught hold of it too. She was indignant and cried, "Let go-it's my onion," and as soon as she said, "my onion," the stalk broke and she fell back into the flames.

One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.

I can only do what's easy. I can only entice and be enticed. I can't, and won't, attempt difficult relations. If I marry it will either be a man who's strong enough to boss me or whom I'm strong enough to boss. So I shan't ever marry, for there aren't such men. And Heaven help any one whom I do marry, for I shall certainly run away from him before you can say 'Jack Robinson.

The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance.

If we act the truth the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

It is easy to sympathize at a distance,' said an old gentleman with a beard. 'I value more the kind word that is spoken close to my ear.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

You confuse what's important with what's impressive.

I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.

I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.

All a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes — morals, behaviour, everything. Absolute trust in some one else is the essence of education.

Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.

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.

One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions.

My conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.

Expansion, that is the idea the novelist must cling to, not completion, not rounding off, but opening out.

I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I'd like to be.

The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.

I'm a holy man minus the holiness.

Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a great mistake and degenerates into defensiveness or hypocrisy.

I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.

But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.

Though life is very glorious, it is difficult.

The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

One can run away from women, turn them out, or give in to them. No fourth course.

Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.

... there are shadows because there are hills.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

We move between two darknesses.

There's never any great risk as long as you have money.

I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper.

School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.

It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.

Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.

Give, do not lend; after death who will thank you?

Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talks that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence. Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend. There are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim, "I do enjoy myself", or , "I am horrified," we are insincere.

There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world.

You told me once that we shall be judged by our intentions, not by our accomplishments. I thought it a grand remark. But we must intend to accomplish - not sit intending on a chair.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden. It is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Sometimes I think too much fuss is made about marriage. Century after century of carnal embracement and we're still no nearer to understanding one another.

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

Characters must not brood too long. They must not waste time running up and down ladders in their own insides.

. . . life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t'other from which . . .

Do not be proud of your inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped like this. It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive and truthful.

Human relations are impossible. When they are real they are uncomfortable, and when they are comfortable they are unreal. It was for the journey into solitude that the human soul was created.

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

Don't go fighting against the Spring.

What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?

All this fame and money, which have so thrilled me when they came to others, leave me cold when they come to me. I am not an ascetic, but I don't know what to do with them, and my daily life has never been so trying, and there is no one to fill it emotionally.

It isn't possible to love and 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 by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.

The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.

When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.

A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.

The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.

So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.

Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.

The sun was already declining and each of the trees held a premonition of night.

It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted.

Money pads the edges of things.

Books have to be read it is the only way of discovering what they contain.

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom.

You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

While her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to tea

Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time - beautiful?

Excuse my mistakes, realize my limitations. Life is not easy as we know it on the earth.

What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives? They have never entered into mine, but into yours, we thought--Haven't we all to struggle against life's daily greyness, against pettiness, against mechanical cheerfulness, against suspicion? I struggle by remembering my friends; others I have known by remembering some place--some beloved place or tree--we thought you one of these.

Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.

If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.

It isn't possible to love and to part.

It's not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.

Adventures do occur, but not punctually.

Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.

Outside the arch, always there seemed another arch. And beyond the remotest echo, a silence.

When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.

The emotions may be endless. The more we express them, the more we may have to express.

One grows accustomed to being praised, or being blamed, or being advised, but it is unusual to be understood.

Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque. A touch will loosen it, and the sooner it goes from us the better.

They go forth [into the world] with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds and undeveloped hearts. An undeveloped heart - not a cold one. The difference is important.