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. FORSTERI cannot help thinking that there is something to admire in everyone, even if you do not approve of them.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.
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We move between two darknesses.
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Sometimes I think too much fuss is made about marriage. Century after century of carnal embracement and we’re still no nearer to understanding one another.
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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.
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But the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable.
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I can only do what’s easy. I can only entice and be enticed. I can’t, and won’t, attempt difficult relations. If I marry it will either be a man who’s strong enough to boss me or whom I’m strong enough to boss.
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Books have to be read it is the only way of discovering what they contain.
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The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected.
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For it is a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.
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Don’t be mysterious; there isn’t the time.
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Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
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It 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.
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There are moments when the inner life actually ‘pays,’ when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim, “I do enjoy myself”, or , “I am horrified,” we are insincere.
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The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.
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Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.
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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.
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My conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.
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Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?
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Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.
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One grows accustomed to being praised, or being blamed, or being advised, but it is unusual to be understood.
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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.
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School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.
E. M. FORSTER