Search quotes by author:    A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z 


E. M. Forster Quotes


Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

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

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

One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.

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

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

Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.

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.

Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.

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.

Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return.

Reverence is fatal to literature.

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

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

Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.

The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.

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.

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.