One doesn't come to Italy for niceness," was the retort; "one comes for life. Buon giorno! Buon giorno!
E. M. ForsterRead
115 quotes
Life's very difficult and full of surprises. At all events, I've got as far as that. To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged - well, one can't do all these things at once, worse luck, because they're so contradictory. It's then that proportion comes in - to live by proportion. Don't begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed.
E. M. ForsterRead
If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting--both for us and for her.
E. M. ForsterRead
It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted.
E. M. ForsterRead
When that strange race nears the dust and is condemned as untouchable, then nature remembers the physical perfection that she accomplished elsewhere, and throws out a god-not many, but one here and there, to prove to society how little its categories impress her.
E. M. ForsterRead
To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.
E. M. ForsterRead
There's enough sorrow in the world, isn't there, without trying to invent it.
E. M. ForsterRead
A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.
E. M. ForsterRead
One minute. You know nothing about him. He probably has his own joys and interests- wife, children, snug little home. That's where we practical fellows'- he smiled-'are more tolerant than you intellectuals. We live and let live, and assume that things are jogging on fairly well elsewhere, and that the ordinary plain man may be trusted to look after his own affairs.
E. M. ForsterRead
Adventures do occur, but not punctually.
E. M. ForsterRead
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.
E. M. ForsterRead
The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.
E. M. ForsterRead
Reverence is fatal to literature.
E. M. ForsterRead
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
E. M. ForsterRead
The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.
E. M. ForsterRead
The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.
E. M. ForsterRead
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. ForsterRead
Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.
E. M. ForsterRead
Their quarrel was no more surprising than are most quarrels — inevitable at the time, incredible afterwards.
E. M. ForsterRead
What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?
E. M. ForsterRead
The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.
E. M. ForsterRead