E. M. Forster
writer, novelist, screenwriter, literary critic, biographer, science fiction writer, librettist, essayist
Read on Wikipedia1879 – 1970
All Quotes by E. M. Forster
“I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.”
“It is so difficult - at least, I find it difficult - to understand people who speak the truth.”
“History develops, art stands still.”
“History develops, art stands still.”
“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”
“The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.”
“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.”
“We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”
“I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.”
“I am the means and not the end. I am the food and not the life. Stand by yourself, as that boy has stood. I cannot save you. For poetry is a spirit; and they that would worship it must worship in spirit and in truth.”
“There is fascism, leading only into the blackness which it has chosen as its symbol, into smartness and yapping out of orders, and self-righteous brutality, into social as well as international war. It means change without hope. Our immediate duty — in that tinkering which is the only useful form of action in our leaky old tub — our immediate duty is to stop it.”
“I know very well how limited and how open to criticism, English freedom is. It is race-bound and it's class-bound.It means freedom for the Englishman, but not for the subject-races of his Empire. If you invite the average Englishman to share his liberties with the inhabitants of India or Kenya, he will reply, "Never," if he is a Tory, and "Not until I consider them worthy" if he is a Liberal.”
“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.”
“Music is the deepest of the arts and deep beneath the arts.”
“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.”
“A wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and — by some sad, strange irony — it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.”
“It is so difficult – at least, I find it difficult – to understand people who speak the truth.”
“Then make my boy think like us. Make him realize that by the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes—a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.”
“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 transalate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions.”
“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 easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.”
“Don’t trust me, Miss Honeychurch. Though life is very glorious, it is difficult.”
“There's nothing like a debate to teach one quickness. I often wish I had gone in for them when I was a youngster. It would have helped me no end.”
“Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.”
“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.”
“In these English farms, if anywhere, one might see life steadily and see it whole, group in one vision its transitoriness and its eternal youth, connect — connect without bitterness until all men are brothers.”
“Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.”
“Adventures do occur, but not punctually.”
“All invitations must proceed from heaven perhaps; perhaps it is futile for men to initiate their own unity, they do but widen the gulfs between them by the attempt.”
“Pathos, piety, courage, — they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.”
“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.”
“A mirror does not develop because an historical pageant passes in front of it. It only develops when it gets a fresh coat of quicksilver — in other words, when it acquires new sensitiveness; and the novel's success lies in its own sensitiveness, not in the success of its subject matter.”
“The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.”
“If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious.”
“How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?”
“Most of us will be eclectics to this side or that according to our temperament. The human mind is not a dignified organ, and I do not see how we can exercise it sincerely except through eclecticism. And the only advice I would offer my fellow eclectics is: "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."”
“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.”
“If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people — a very few people, but a few novelists are among them — are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest is against such a search: organized religion, the state, the family in its economic aspect, have nothing to gain, and it is only when outward prohibitions weaken that it can proceed: history conditions it to that extent.”
“I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”
“There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.”
“Whether Parliament is either a representative body or an efficient one is questionable, but I value it because it criticizes and talks, and because its chatter gets widely reported. So two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three.”
“The Valkyries are symbols not only of courage but of intelligence; they represent the human spirit snatching its opportunity while the going is good, and one of them even finds time to love. Bruennhilde's last song hymns the recurrence of love, and since it is the privilege of art to exaggerate she goes even further, and proclaims the love which is eternally triumphant, and feeds upon freedom and lives.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.”
“[Tolerance] is just a makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends.”
“Love is always being given where it is not required.”
“Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.”
“Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.”
“A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.”
“What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote, and brings to birth in us also the creative impulse.”
“Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think is creation's.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Unless we remember we cannot understand.”
“A humanist has four leading characteristics — curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.”
“Dead silence ensued, which was well enough for Ansell, to whom it merely meant that neither of us had any more to say. But to educated people silence matters; it is a token of stupidity and lack of invention.”
“But that was only the beginning of her mortification. Harold had proved her wrong. He had seen that she was a shifty, shallow hypocrite. She had not dared to be alone with him since her exposure. She had never looked at him and had hardly spoken. He seemed cheerful, but what was he thinking? He would never forgive her.”
“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 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.”
“Nonsense and beauty have close connections.”
“What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?”
“Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.”
“Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.”
“The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.”
“The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.”
“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.”