Quotes by E.M. Forster

There stood a young man who had the figure of a Greek athlete and the face of an English one...Just where he began to be beautiful the clothes started.

But the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I dont believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Arts sake.

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art.

If you introduce the human figure you at once arouse either disgust or desire.

Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.

I did not fear that I might tread upon a live rail and be killed. I feared something far more intangible-doing what was not contemplated by the Machine. Then I said to myself, “Man is the measure”, and I went, and after many visits I found an opening.

Why children? he asked. Why always children? For love to end where it begins is far more beautiful, and Nature knows it.

Im afraid that in nine cases out of ten Nature pulls one way and human nature another.

I believed in a return to Nature once. But how can we return to Nature when we have never been with her? Today, I believe that we must discover Nature. After many conquests we shall attain simplicity. It is our heritage.

An acquaintance had become a lover, might become a husband, but would retain all that she had noted in the acquaintance; and love must confirm an old relation rather than reveal a new one.

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom.

No; look out for the part where you think you have done with the goblins and they come back, breathed Helen, as the music started with a goblin walking quietly over the universe, from end to end.

While her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to tea

We move between two darknesses.

Either life entails courage or it ceases to be life.

All a childs life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes - morals, behavior, everything. Absolute trust in someone else is the essence of education.

Id far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.

For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and—by some sad, strange irony—it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.

I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows.