The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.
E. M. FORSTERThe king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
-
-
Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.
E. M. FORSTER -
Though life is very glorious, it is difficult.
E. M. FORSTER -
The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.
E. M. FORSTER -
One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
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 -
It is easy to sympathize at a distance,’ said an old gentleman with a beard. ‘I value more the kind word that is spoken close to my ear.
E. M. FORSTER -
Think before you speak is criticism’s motto; speak before you think, creation’s.
E. M. FORSTER -
One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
E. M. FORSTER -
People 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 -
But 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. FORSTER -
She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position; it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship.
E. M. FORSTER -
Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
E. M. FORSTER -
If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
E. M. FORSTER -
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. FORSTER -
Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.
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 -
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. 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 -
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 -
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. FORSTER -
Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
E. M. FORSTER -
Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talks that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.
E. M. FORSTER -
The emotions may be endless. The more we express them, the more we may have to express.
E. M. FORSTER -
You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.
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 -
It is so difficult – at least, I find it difficult – to understand people who speak the truth.
E. M. FORSTER