Quotes by E. M. Forster

“She loved him with too clear a vision to fear his cloudiness.”

“Leonard looked at her wondering, and had the sense of great things sweeping out of the shrouded night. But he could not receive them, because his heart was still full of little things.”

“One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.”

“A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.”

“Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the grey, sober against the fire.”

“Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom.”

“Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West.”

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

“So, Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism”

“Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“Think before you speak is criticisms motto; speak before you think, creations”

“Only connect.”

“Beethovens Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man”

“I suggest that 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 gone ourselves.”

“What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?”

“I am the means and not the end. I am the food and not the life. Stand by yourself, as that boy has stood. I cannot save you. For poetry is a spirit; and they that would worship it must worship in spirit and in truth.”