Edward Forster Quotes
Most popular Edward Forster Quotes
I do not believe in Belief.
Nonsense and beauty have close connection.
How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?
Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.
One has two duties—to be worried and not to be worried.
Truth is a flower in whose neighborhood others must wither.
Where there is officialism every human relationship suffers.
To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art.
Ecstasy cannot last, but can carve a channel for something lasting.
The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for.
If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.
Listening is a very dangerous thing. If one listens, one may be convinced.
Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think creation's.
One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face.
The historian must have some conception of how people who are not historians behave.
Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darknesses.
The emotions may be endless. The more we express them, the more we may have to express.
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate. Adventures do occur, but not punctually.
Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible.
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
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.
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 outcomes we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.
Art . . . is the one orderly product which 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 . . . it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.
What about the creative state? In it 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.
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.
