Novelist · English · 1879 – 1970 · 89 quotes
Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return.
E. M. Forster
Novelist · English · 1879 – 1970
At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes.
Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.
Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
I never could get on with representative individuals but people who existed on their own account and with whom it might therefore be possible to be friends.
There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.
The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.
If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.
We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.
Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.
Unless we remember we cannot understand.
History develops, art stands still.
I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper.
Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due - she reminds us too much of a prima donna.
I'm a holy man minus the holiness.
Reverence is fatal to literature.
I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
I am certainly an ought and not a must.
Ideas are fatal to caste.
Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!
I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I'd like to be.
How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
I am so used to seeing the sort of play which deals with one man and two women. They do not leave me with the feeling I have made a full theatrical meal they do not give me the experience of the multiplicity of life.
No one is India.
The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.
Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.
