Edward Morgan Forster quotes

 quotes - Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.

“Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

 quotes - We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

“We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

 quotes - Love is always being given where it is not required.

“Love is always being given where it is not required.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

 quotes - History develops, art stands still.

“History develops, art stands still.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

“One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

“Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

“Reverence is fatal to literature.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

“Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

“England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

“I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

“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.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

“If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

“It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

“It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

“Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

“One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

“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.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

“Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

“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.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

“Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

“The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

“The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

“The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

“There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

“There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

“Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

“We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

“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.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

“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.”

— Edward Morgan Forster

“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.”

— Edward Morgan Forster