One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
E. M. FORSTERSpoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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There’s never any great risk as long as you have money.
E. M. FORSTER -
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.
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 -
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 -
Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
E. M. FORSTER -
It isn’t possible to love and 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 by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
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 -
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 -
The emotions may be endless. The more we express them, the more we may have to express.
E. M. FORSTER -
It isn’t possible to love and to part.
E. M. FORSTER -
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. 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 -
She had been so wicked that in all her life she had done only one good deed-given an onion to a beggar. So she went to hell. As she lay in torment she saw the onion, lowered down from heaven by an angel. She caught hold of it. He began to pull her up.
E. M. FORSTER -
It makes a difference doesn’t it, whether we fully fence ourselves in, or whether we are fenced out by the barriers of others?
E. M. FORSTER -
At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
E. M. FORSTER