E. M. Forster quotes - page 2

Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate. (E. M. Forster)
Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.
E. M. Forster
Tolerance is a very dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is negative. It merely means putting up with people, being able to stand things.
E. M. Forster
Science, when applied to personal relationships, is always just wrong .
E. M. Forster
All invitations must proceed from heaven perhaps; perhaps it is futile for men to initiate their own unity, they do but widen the gulfs between them by the attempt.
E. M. Forster
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.
E. M. Forster
Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.
E. M. Forster
Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.
E. M. Forster
Why can't we be friends now?" said the other, holding him affectionately. "It's what I want. It's what you want." But the horses didn't want it - they swerved apart: the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temple, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they emerged from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices "No, not yet," and the sky said "No, not there.
E. M. Forster
But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist's readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters.
E. M. Forster
The story of the Fall always fascinates me as a play ground, but I cannot find any profound meaning in it, because of my 'liberal' view of human nature: I cannot believe in a state of original innocence, still less in a profound meaning in it, and I am always minimising the conception and the extent of Sin and the sinfulness of sex. (E. M. Forster)
Before the civil war, Pottibakia was a normal member of the Comity of Nations. She erected tariff walls, broke treaties, persecuted minorities, obstructed at conferences unless she was convinced there was no danger of a satisfactory solution; then she strained every nerve in the cause of peace.
E. M. Forster
It isn't possible to love and to part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know from experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
E. M. Forster
It is so difficult – at least, I find it difficult – to understand people who speak the truth.
E. M. Forster
Adventures do occur, but not punctually.
E. M. Forster
Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time - beautiful?
E. M. Forster
There is fascism, leading only into the blackness which it has chosen as its symbol, into smartness and yapping out of orders, and self-righteous brutality, into social as well as international war. It means change without hope. Our immediate duty - in that tinkering which is the only useful form of action in our leaky old tub - our immediate duty is to stop it.
E. M. Forster
Self-pity? I see no moral objections to it, the smell drives people away, but that's a practical objection, and occasionally an advantage.
E. M. Forster
[...] it is now only in letters I write what I feel: not in literature any more, and I seldom say it, because I keep trying to be amusing.
E. M. Forster
Happiness in the ordinary sense is not what one needs in life, though one is right to aim at it. The true satisfaction is to come through and see those whom one loves come through.
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 the examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one be a penny the stupider. (E. M. Forster)
Axiom: Novel must have either one living character or a perfect pattern: fails otherwise.
E. M. Forster
If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious.
E. M. Forster
Naked I came into this world, naked I shall go out of it. And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its colour.
E. M. Forster
Pathos, piety, courage, - they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.
E. M. Forster