You told me once that we shall be judged by our intentions, not by our accomplishments. I thought it a grand remark. But we must intend to accomplish – not sit intending on a chair.
E. M. FORSTERI believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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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. FORSTER -
I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.
E. M. FORSTER -
You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.
E. M. FORSTER -
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. FORSTER -
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. FORSTER -
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.
E. M. FORSTER -
We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won’t do harm – yes, choose a place where you won’t do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.
E. M. FORSTER -
I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.
E. M. FORSTER -
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. FORSTER -
Give, do not lend; after death who will thank you?
E. M. FORSTER -
So I shan’t ever marry, for there aren’t such men. And Heaven help any one whom I do marry, for I shall certainly run away from him before you can say ‘Jack Robinson.
E. M. FORSTER -
Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend.
E. M. FORSTER -
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. FORSTER -
Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.
E. M. FORSTER -
Life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t’other from which . . .
E. M. FORSTER