E.M. Forster: Trending quotes
E.M. Forster trending quotes. Read the latest quotes in collection
Variant: No, he is not tactful, yet have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet, at the same time, beautiful?
Source: A Room with a View
“Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.”
Variant: Adventures do occur, but not punctually. Life rarely gives us what we want at the moment we consider appropriate.
Source: A Passage to India
“How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?”
Source: Aspects of the Novel (1927), Chapter Five: The Plot
“It is so difficult – at least, I find it difficult – to understand people who speak the truth.”
Source: A Room with a View (1908), Ch.1
“Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.”
Source: Howards End (1910), Ch. 41
“By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes--a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.”
Source: A Room with a View
Source: Howards End (1910), Ch. 22
Context: Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.
“Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.”
Source: A Room with a View (1908), Ch. 14
Source: A Room With A View
This has sometimes been misquoted as: If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the decency to betray my country.
What I Believe (1938)
Source: What I Believe and Other Essays
What I Believe (1938)
Context: On they go — an invincible army, yet not a victorious one. The aristocrats, the elect, the chosen, the Best People — all the words that describe them are false, and all attempts to organize them fail. Again and again Authority, seeing their value, has tried to net them and to utilize them as the Egyptian Priesthood or the Christian Church or the Chinese Civil Service or the Group Movement, or some other worthy stunt. But they slip through the net and are gone; when the door is shut, they are no longer in the room; their temple, as one of them remarked, is the holiness of the Heart's affections, and their kingdom, though they never possess it, is the wide-open world.
With this type of person knocking about, and constantly crossing one's path if one has eyes to see or hands to feel, the experiment of earthly life cannot be dismissed as a failure. But it may well be hailed as a tragedy, the tragedy being that no device has been found by which these private decencies can be transmitted to public affairs. As soon as people have power they go crooked and sometimes dotty as well, because the possession of power lifts them into a region where normal honesty never pays.
“One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life”
What I Believe (1938)
Context: One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life, and it is therefore essential that they should not let one down. They often do. The moral of which is that I must, myself, be as reliable as possible, and this I try to be. But reliability is not a matter of contract — that is the main difference between the world of personal relationships and the world of business relationships. It is a matter for the heart, which signs no documents. In other words, reliability is impossible unless there is a natural warmth. Most men possess this warmth, though they often have bad luck and get chilled. Most of them, even when they are politicians, want to keep faith. And one can, at all events, show one's own little light here, one's own poor little trembling flame, with the knowledge that it is not the only light that is shining in the darkness, and not the only one which the darkness does not comprehend.
Source: Howards End (1910), Ch. 11
Context: He remembered his wife's even goodness during thirty years. Not anything in detail — not courtship or early raptures —but just the unvarying virtue, that seemed to him a woman's noblest quality. So many women are capricious, breaking into odd flaws of passion or frivolity. Not so his wife. Year after year, summer and winter, as bride and mother, she had been the same, he had always trusted her. Her tenderness! Her innocence! The wonderful innocence that was hers by the gift of God. Ruth knew no more of worldly wickedness and wisdom than did the flowers in her garden, or the grass in her field. Her idea of business — "Henry, why do people who have enough money try to get more money?" Her idea of politics — "I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars," Her idea of religion — ah, this had been a cloud, but a cloud that passed. She came of Quaker stock, and he and his family, formerly Dissenters, were now members of the Church of England. The rector's sermons had at first repelled her, and she had expressed a desire for "a more inward light," adding, "not so much for myself as for baby" (Charles). Inward light must have been granted, for he heard no complaints in later years. They brought up their three children without dispute. They had never disputed.
She lay under the earth now. She had gone, and as if to make her going the more bitter, had gone with a touch of mystery that was all unlike her.