E. M. Forster
What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?Collection: Good
Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.Collection: Women
The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.Collection: Poetry
Love is always being given where it is not required.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Freedom
Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.Collection: Death
Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.Collection: Faith
If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.Collection: Hope
Unless we remember we cannot understand.Collection: Brainy
The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.Collection: Society
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.Collection: Art
The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.Collection: Death
One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.Collection: Trust
Nonsense and beauty have close connections.Collection: Beauty
England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.Collection: Nature
History develops, art stands still.Collection: Art
I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.Collection: Mom
To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.Collection: Art
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.Collection: Poetry
Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.Collection: Courage
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.Collection: Great
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.Collection: Life
The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.Collection: Good
The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.
We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.
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.
Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's.
How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance.
Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
Two cheers for Democracy; one because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism.
At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes.
Tolerance is a very dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is negative. It merely means putting up with people, being able to stand things.
Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.
Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.
We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.
If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.
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.
Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.
People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.
The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.
Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.
Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.
It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.
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.
Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.
Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.
The woman who can't influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself.
One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.