E M Forster quotes

I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

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

The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.

History develops, art stands still.

Love is always being given where it is not required.

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.

The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.

People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.

History develops, art stands still.

I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper.

One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.

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

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

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

Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.

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 outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.

The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.

England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.

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

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.

The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.

The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.