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Edward M. Forster Quotes

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"Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice."

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

"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 suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have gone ourselves."

"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."
Art

"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."

"Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch."
Faith

"What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote."

"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."
Art

"They go forth with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds and undeveloped hearts. An undeveloped heart-not a cold one. The difference is important."

"Yes, oh dear, yes, the novel tells a story."

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

"This opera is my Nunc Dimittis, in that it dismisses me peacefully and convinces me I have achieved."

"It is the one orderly product our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths; it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden the best evidence we can give of our dignity."

"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."

"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."

"Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon."

"Nonsense and beauty have close connections."

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

"A facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade, every type of dubiousness."

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