There are moments when the inner life actually ‘pays,’ when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.
E. M. FORSTERThere are moments when the inner life actually ‘pays,’ when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.
E. M. FORSTEROnly a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
E. M. FORSTERCreative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
E. M. FORSTERI believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.
E. M. FORSTERThe historian records, but the novelist creates.
E. M. FORSTERTo make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.
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. FORSTERAdventures do occur, but not punctually.
E. M. FORSTERShe 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… there are shadows because there are hills.
E. M. FORSTERWhen you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.
E. M. FORSTERGive, do not lend; after death who will thank you?
E. M. FORSTERIt is so difficult – at least, I find it difficult – to understand people who speak the truth.
E. M. FORSTERI have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.
E. M. FORSTERMoney pads the edges of things.
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. FORSTER