Top 398 Quotes & Sayings by E. M. Forster - Page 7

One doesn't come to Italy for niceness," was the retort; "one comes for life. Buon giorno! Buon giorno!

It is now only in letters I write what I feel: not in literature any more, and I seldom say it, because I keep trying to be amusing.

Sex begins before adolescence, and survives sterility; it is indeed coeval with our lives, although at the mating age its effects are more obvious to Society.

He educated Maurice, or rather his spirit educated Maurice's spirit, for they themselves became equal. Neither thought "Am I led; am I leading?" Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection.

I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.

The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken.

In the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life.

I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.

Tolerance is just a makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends.

Intuition attracts those who wish to be spiritual without any bother, because it promises a heaven where the intuitions of others can be ignored.

Happiness in the ordinary sense is not what one needs in life, though one is right to aim at it. The true satisfaction is to come through, and see those whom one lives come through.

A sentence begins quite simply, then it undulates and expands, parentheses intervene like quick-set hedges, the flowers of comparison bloom, and three fields off, like a wounded partridge, crouches the principal verb, making one wonder as one picks it up, poor little thing, whether after all it was worth such a tramp, so many guns, and such expensive dogs, and what, after all, is its relation to the main subject, potted so gaily half a page back, and proving finally to have been in the accusative case.

This solitude opressed her; she was accustomed to have her thoughts confirmed by others or, at all events, contradicted; it was too dreadful not to know whether she was thinking right or wrong.

Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a great mistake and degenerates into defensiveness or hypocrisy.

It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted.

I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.

Pity wraps the student of the past in an ambrosial cloud, and washes his limbs with eternal youth.

It was unbearable, and he thought again, 'How unhappy I am!' and became happier.

She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.

In Europe life retreats out of the cold, and exquisite fireside myths have resulted—Balder, Persephone—but [in India] the retreat is from the source of life, the treacherous sun, and no poetry adorns it because disillusionment cannot be beautiful. Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form, and India fails to accommodate them.

You do care a little for me, I know... but nothing to speak of, and you don't love me. I was yours once till death if you'd cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now... and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness.

Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull.

It is so difficult - at least, I find it difficult - to understand people who speak the truth.

Life's very difficult and full of surprises. At all events, I've got as far as that. To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged - well, one can't do all these things at once, worse luck, because they're so contradictory. It's then that proportion comes in - to live by proportion. Don't begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed.

Was Mrs. Wilcox one of the unsatisfactory people- there are many of them- who dangle intimacy and then withdraw it? They evoke our interests and affections, and keep the life of the spirit dawdling around them. Then they withdraw. When physical passion is involved, there is a definite name for such behaviour- flirting- and if carried far enough, it is punishable by law. But no law- not public opinion, even- punishes those who coquette with friendship, though the dull ache that they inflict, the sense of misdirected effort and exhaustion, may be as intolerable. Was she one of these?

An acquaintance had become a lover, might become a husband, but would retain all that she had noted in the acquaintance; and love must confirm an old relation rather than reveal a new one.

If only the sense of actuality can be lulled-and it sleeps for ever in most historians-there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.

I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.

A novel is based on evidence, + or -x, the unknown quantity being the temperament of the novelist, and the unknown quantity always modifies the effect of the evidence, and sometimes transforms it entirely.

This element of surprise or mystery the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called is of great importance in a plot.

It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.

I really don't know what happens next -- one so seldom does.

All that is observable in a man-that is to say his actions and such of his spiritual existence as can be deduced from his actions-falls into the domain of history.

Riposte of "that old lady in the anecdote who was accused by her nieces of being illogical," Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish! How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?

In the light of her son's comment she reconsidered the scene at the mosque, to see whose impression was correct. Yes it could be worked into quite an unpleasant scene. The doctor had begun by bullying her, had said Mrs Callendar was nice, and then - finding the ground safe - had changed; he had alternately whined over his grievances and patronized her, had run a dozen ways in a single sentence, had been unreliable, inquisitive, vain. Yes, it was all true, but how false as a summary of the man; the essential life of him had been slain.

In time, Mr Hall, one gets to recognize that sneer, that hardness, for fornication extends far beyond the actual deed. Were it a deed only, I for one would not hold it anathema. But when the nations went a whoring they invariably ended by denying God, I think, and until all sexual irregularities and not some of them are penal the Church will never reconquer England.

It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why history is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead.