 |
America
|
|
America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for. It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large.
-E. M. Forster
|
|
Art
|
|
|
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.
-E. M. Forster
|
|
Authors & Writing
|
|
|
The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.
-E. M. Forster
|
|
|
Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
-E. M. Forster
|
|
Beauty
|
|
|
Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due -- she reminds us too much of a prima donna.
-E. M. Forster
|
|
Belief
|
|
|
There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.
-E. M. Forster
|
|
Career, Vocation
|
|
|
The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly silent.
-E. M. Forster
|
|
Caution
|
|
|
Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.
-E. M. Forster
|
|
Character
|
|
|
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.
-E. M. Forster
|
|
City Life, Cities
|
|
|
Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.
-E. M. Forster
|
|
Communication
|
|
|
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.
-E. M. Forster
|
|
Consumerism
|
|
|
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.
-E. M. Forster
|
|
Curiosity
|
|
|
Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom.
-E. M. Forster
|
|
Death
|
|
|
Death destroys a man, the idea of Death saves him.
-E. M. Forster
|
|
Democracy
|
|
|
Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.
-E. M. Forster
|
|
Dignity
|
|
|
At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
-E. M. Forster
|
|
Doubt
|
|
|
Lord I disbelieve -- help thou my unbelief.
-E. M. Forster
|
|
Education
|
|
|
Oxford is -- Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.
-E. M. Forster
|
|
|
As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take this examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one would be a penny the stupider.
-E. M. Forster
|
|
Faith
|
|
|
Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible.
-E. M. Forster
|
|
Friends
|
|
|
I believe we shall come to care about people less and less. The more people one knows the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London.
-E. M. Forster
|
|
Greatness & Great Things
|
|
|
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.
-E. M. Forster
|
|
History
|
|
|
The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.
-E. M. Forster
|
|
Ideas
|
|
|
Ideas are fatal to caste.
-E. M. Forster
|
|
Learning
|
|
|
Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
-E. M. Forster
|
Books by and about E. M. Forster