Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.
E. M. ForsterRead
115 quotes
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
E. M. ForsterRead
Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
E. M. ForsterRead
But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else.
E. M. ForsterRead
Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.
E. M. ForsterRead
How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who cannot find their way home. India knows of their trouble. She knows of the whole world's trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls "Come" through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal.
E. M. ForsterRead
She loved him absolutely, perhaps for half an hour.
E. M. ForsterRead
They had nothing in common but the English language.
E. M. ForsterRead
Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.
E. M. ForsterRead
I am so used to seeing the sort of play which deals with one man and two women. They do not leave me with the feeling I have made a full theatrical meal they do not give me the experience of the multiplicity of life.
E. M. ForsterRead
I never could get on with representative individuals but people who existed on their own account and with whom it might therefore be possible to be friends.
E. M. ForsterRead
The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.
E. M. ForsterRead
Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.
E. M. ForsterRead
Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.
E. M. ForsterRead
One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
E. M. ForsterRead
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.
E. M. ForsterRead
Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all... My lawgivers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul. My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in the Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is 'Lord, I disbelieve - help thou my unbelief.
E. M. ForsterRead
Only connect!...Only connect the prose and the passion.
E. M. ForsterRead
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.
E. M. ForsterRead
One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.
E. M. ForsterRead
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.
E. M. ForsterRead