Quotes by E. M. Forster

Chicago - a facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade every type of dubiousness.

In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.

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

An efficiency-regime cannot be run without a few heroes stuck about it to carry off the dullness - much as plums have to be put into a bad pudding to make it palatable.

It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals and perhaps this is why history is so attractive to the more timid among us.

Failure and success seem to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling of fighting with their star or against it and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is this wriggle.

Our life on earth is and ought to be material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly they are still entangled with the desire for ownership.

How can I know what I think till I see what I say?

Love is always being given where it is not required.

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

Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.

History develops, art stands still.

Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.

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

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

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.

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.

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

The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man cant touch.