Quotes from E.M. Forster

Her life, he saw, was without meaning. To what purpose was her diplomacy, her insincerity, her continued repression of vigour? Did they make any one better or happier? Did they even bring happiness to herself? Harriet with her gloomy peevish creed, Lilia with her clutches after pleasure, were after all more divine than this well-ordered, active, useless machine.

Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.

You are young, dears, and however clever young people are, and however many books they read, they will never guess what it feels like to grow old.

In the presence of these women Leonard had arrived, and he spoke with a flow, an exultation, that he had seldom known.

But whereas the story appeals to our curiosity and the plot to our intelligence, the pattern appeals to our aesthetic sense, it causes us to see the book as a whole.

You've not been content to dream, as we have.

all. I would rather go up to heaven by myself than be pushed by cherubs; and if I got there I should like my friends to lean out of it, just as they do here.

A man who has been through hell does not boast of his virility. He is humble and hides it, if, indeed, it still exists.

We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice.

his whole life was coloured by a contempt of the intellect. That he had a tolerable intellect of his own was not the point: it is in what we value, not in what we have, that the test of us resides.

Now, what is the good of driblets? To go through life having done one thing — to have raised one person from the abyss; not these puny gifts of shillings and blankets — making the grey more grey. No doubt people will think me extraordinary.

his friends are as young and as ignorant as himself. They are full of the wine of life. But they have not tasted the cup—let us call it the teacup—of experience, which has made men of Mr. Pembroke's type what they are. Oh, that teacup! To be taken at prayers, at friendship, at love, till we are quite sane, efficient, quite experienced, and quite useless to God or man. We must drink it, or we shall die. But we need not drink it always. Here is our problem and our salvation.

efforts not so much to acquire knowledge as to dispel a little of the darkness by which we and all our acquisitions are surrounded.

At once he was horrified too; saw that the idea was monstrous; abused

for man is so made that he cannot remember long without a symbol; he wished there was a society, a kind of friendship office, where the marriage of true minds could be registered.

Look at those flies on the ceiling. Why have you not drowned them?" "Huzoor, they return." "Like all evil things.

True socialism is based not on equality of income or character, but on the equality of manners.

Nor were the Arabs content with praising the lighthouse: they even looked at it. "El Manarah," as they called it, gave the name to, and became the model for, the minaret, and one can still find minarets in Egypt that exactly reproduce the design of Sostratus—the bottom story square, second octagonal, third round.

El món realment és ple de coses precioses si saps com trobar-les.

London was but a foretaste of this nomadic civilisation which is altering human nature so profoundly, and throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever borne before. Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force that they once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone. May Love be equal to the task!

she had outgrown stimulants, and was passing from words to things.

She always treated him as a boy, which he was, and as a fool, which he was not, thinking herself so immeasurably superior to him that she neglected opportunity after opportunity of establishing her rule. He was good-looking and indolent; therefore he must be stupid. He was poor; therefore he would never dare to criticize his benefactress. He was passionately in love with her; therefore she could do exactly as she liked.

Poor Mrs. Charles sat between her silent companions terrified at the course of events, and a little bored. She was a rubbishy little creature, and she knew it. A telegram had dragged her from Naples to the death-bed of a woman whom she had scarcely known. A word from her husband had plunged her into mourning. She desired to mourn inwardly as well, but she wished that Mrs. Wilcox, since fated to die, could have died before the marriage, for then less would have been expected of her.

Shrines are fascinating, especially when rarely opened.