Quote

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.

E. M. Forster

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

E. M. Forster
Age: 91 †
Born: 1879
Born: January 1
Died: 1970
Died: June 7
Biographer
Essayist
Librettist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
London
England
Edward Morgan Forster
E Forster
EM Forster
Always
Often
Uniformity
Men
Around
Distrust
Littles
Pool
Little
Desert
Come
Greatness
Feel
Produce
Feels
Blood
Great
Pleasure

More quotes by E. M. Forster

Image
But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist's readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters.
E. M. Forster
Image
If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious.
E. M. Forster
Image
The so called white races are really pinko-grey.
E. M. Forster
Image
It is the starved imagination, not the well nourished, that is afraid.
E. M. Forster
Image
Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a great mistake and degenerates into defensiveness or hypocrisy.
E. M. Forster
Image
The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal. Both assumptions are false: both of them must be accepted as true if we are to go on eating and working and loving, and are to keep open a few breathing holes for the human spirit.
E. M. Forster
Image
By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes--a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.
E. M. Forster
Image
How few writers can prostitute all their powers!
E. M. Forster
Image
She loved him absolutely, perhaps for half an hour.
E. M. Forster
Image
Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown
E. M. Forster
Image
All men are equal — all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas.
E. M. Forster
Image
Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it.
E. M. Forster
Image
She must be assured that it is not a criminal offense to love at first sight.
E. M. Forster
Image
The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.
E. M. Forster
Image
Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something vulgarity, concealing something.
E. M. Forster
Image
One grows accustomed to being praised, or being blamed, or being advised, but it is unusual to be understood.
E. M. Forster
Image
The present flowed by them like a stream. The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment. The moment had passed. The tree rustled again. Their senses were sharpened, and they seemed to apprehend life. Life passed. The tree rustled again.
E. M. Forster
Image
There are moments when the inner life actually 'pays,' when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.
E. M. Forster
Image
It was not that ladies were inferior to men it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself she would be first censured, then despised, and finally ignored.
E. M. Forster
Image
The novelist, unlike many of his colleagues, makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself (roughly: niceties shallcome later), gives them names and sex, assigns them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of inverted commas, and perhaps to behave consistently.
E. M. Forster