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 M. Forster
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Edward M. Forster quotes
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.
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.
Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
A facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade, every type of dubiousness.
America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for. It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large.
As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take this examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one would be a penny the stupider.
At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due - she reminds us too much of a prima donna.
Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
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.
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.
I have been racking my brains and can find no reply to this very reasonable question. I can only suggest that the fictional part of me dried up.
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.
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.
If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.
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.
Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice...
Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.
Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
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.
The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.
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.
There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.
They go forth with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds and undeveloped hearts. An undeveloped heart-not a cold one. The difference is important.
This opera is my Nunc Dimittis, in that it dismisses me peacefully and convinces me I have achieved.
Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.
Unless we remember we cannot understand.
Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.
We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.
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.
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
Where there is officialism every human relationship suffers.
Yes, oh dear, yes, the novel tells a story.
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