When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.
E. M. FORSTERWhen I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.
E. M. FORSTERThough life is very glorious, it is difficult.
E. M. FORSTERYou 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 won’t be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.
E. M. FORSTERLove 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. FORSTERBut it struck him that people are not really dead until they are felt to be dead. As long as there is some misunderstanding about them, they possess a sort of immortality.
E. M. FORSTEROne grows accustomed to being praised, or being blamed, or being advised, but it is unusual to be understood.
E. M. FORSTERIt was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons.
E. M. FORSTEROne of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.
E. M. FORSTERIf we act the truth the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run
E. M. FORSTERHuman 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. FORSTERWhat is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
E. M. FORSTERFaith, 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.
E. M. FORSTERBooks have to be read it is the only way of discovering what they contain.
E. M. FORSTEROnly a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
E. M. FORSTERPeople have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.
E. M. FORSTER