E. M. Forster Quotes

The sort of poetry I seek only resides in objects Man can't touch - like England 's grass network of lanes 100 years ago, but today he can destroy them and only Lord Farrer keeps him from doing it.

Don't believe those lies about intellectual people. They're only written to soothe the majority.

It is devilish difficult to criticise society & also create human beings.

Nature pulls one way and human nature another.

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.

Love felt and returned, love which our bodies exact and our hearts have transfigured, love which is the most real thing that we shall ever meet, reappeared now as the world's enemy, and she must stifle it.

Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.

Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!

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.

Ideas are fatal to caste.

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

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.

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.

Adventures do occur, but not punctually.

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

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.

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

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.

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

Even a fellow with a camera has his favourite subjects, as we can see looking through the Kodak-albums of our friends. One amateur prefers the family group, another bathing scenes, another cows upon an alp, or kittens held upside down in the arms of a black-faced child. The tendency to choose one subject rather than another indicates the photographer's temperament. Nevertheless, his passion is for photography rather than for selection, a kitten will serve when no cows are available.

But after all, what have we to do with taverns? Real menace belongs to the drawing-room.

For you cannot have gentility without paying for it.

Do you remember Italy?

One doesn't come to Italy for niceness," was the retort; "one comes for life. Buon giorno! Buon giorno!

I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.

Was Mrs. Wilcox one of the unsatisfactory people- there are many of them- who dangle intimacy and then withdraw it? They evoke our interests and affections, and keep the life of the spirit dawdling around them. Then they withdraw. When physical passion is involved, there is a definite name for such behaviour- flirting- and if carried far enough, it is punishable by law. But no law- not public opinion, even- punishes those who coquette with friendship, though the dull ache that they inflict, the sense of misdirected effort and exhaustion, may be as intolerable. Was she one of these?

It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.

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.

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

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.

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.

When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else.

Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.

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.

“It is Fate that I am here,” persisted George. “But you can call it Italy if it makes you less unhappy.”

For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.

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.

History develops, art stands still.

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.

Though life is very glorious, it is difficult.

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.

Reformers who are obsessed with purity and cannot see that their obsession is impure.

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.

The traveller who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it.

My law-givers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul.

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

Pity wraps the student of the past in an ambrosial cloud, and washes his limbs with eternal youth.

I'm a holy man minus the holiness. Hand that on to your three spies, and tell them to put it in their pipes.