3 December 2020 E. M. Forster Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due – she reminds us too much of a prima donna.
3 December 2020 E. M. Forster 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.
3 December 2020 E. M. Forster If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
3 December 2020 E. M. Forster What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
3 December 2020 E. M. Forster The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.
3 December 2020 E. M. Forster The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
3 December 2020 E. M. Forster What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?
3 December 2020 E. M. Forster 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.
3 December 2020 E. M. Forster Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.
3 December 2020 E. M. Forster One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.
3 December 2020 E. M. Forster 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.
3 December 2020 E. M. Forster I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.
3 December 2020 E. M. Forster The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.
3 December 2020 E. M. Forster One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
3 December 2020 E. M. Forster I am so used to seeing the sort of play which deals with one man and two women. They do not leave me with the feeling I have made a full theatrical meal they do not give me the experience of the multiplicity of life.
3 December 2020 E. M. Forster 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.
3 December 2020 E. M. Forster A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
3 December 2020 E. M. Forster We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
3 December 2020 E. M. Forster The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.
