M. Forster Quotes (19 Quotes)

You remember how he would trust strangers, and if they fooled him he would say, 'It's better to be fooled than to be suspicious'--that the confidence trick is the work of man, but the want-of-confidence trick is the work of the devil.

It is the one orderly product 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 the best evidence we can give of our dignity.

Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the grey, sober against the fire.

This opera is my Nunc Dimittis, in that it dismisses me peacefully and convinces me I have achieved.

It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.

. . . the crime of suicide lies rather in its disregard for the feelings of those whom we leave behind.

American women shoot the hippopotamus with eyebrows made of platinum

Away she hurried, not beautiful, not supremely brilliant, but filled with something that took the place of both qualities -- something best described as a profound vivacity, a continual and sincere response to all that she encountered in her path through life.

I am the means and not the end. I am the food and not the life. Stand by yourself, as that boy has stood. I cannot save you. For poetry is a spirit and they that would worship it must worship in spirit and in truth.

Leonard looked at her wondering, and had the sense of great things sweeping out of the shrouded night. But he could not receive them, because his heart was still full of little things.

It is a mistake to think that books have come to stay. The human race did without them for thousands of years and may decide to do without them again.

Some closing of the gates is inevitable after thirty, if the mind itself is to become a creative power.

London was beginning to illuminate herself against the night. Electric lights sizzled and jagged in the main thoroughfares, gas-lamps in the side streets glimmered a canary gold or green.

Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.

She loved him with too clear a vision to fear his cloudiness.

Ulysses . . . is a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud.

Some twenty years her senior, he preserved a gift that she supposed herself to have already lost--not youth's creative power, but its self-confidence and optimism.

The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment.

You can transmute love, muddle it, ignore it... but you can never pull it out of you...