Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
I hated the idleness, the stupidity, the respectability, the petty unselfishness.
E. M. Forster
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Unselfishness
Respectability
Idleness
Petty
Stupidity
Hated
Hate
More quotes by E. M. Forster
It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted.
E. M. Forster
If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.
E. M. Forster
I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.
E. M. Forster
I only wish the poets would say this too: love is of the body not the body, but of the the body. Ah! the misery that would be saved if we confessed that! Ah! for a little directness to liberate the soul!
E. M. Forster
Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.
E. M. Forster
It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
E. M. Forster
Books have to be read it is the only way of discovering what they contain.
E. M. Forster
There has been, is, and always will be every conceivable type of person.
E. M. Forster
I don't think literature will be purged until its philosophic pretentiousness is extruded, and I shant live to see that purge, nor perhaps when it has happened will anything survive.
E. M. Forster
I really don't know what happens next -- one so seldom does.
E. M. Forster
There is much good luck in the world, but it is luck. We are none of us safe. We are children, playing or quarrelling on the line.
E. M. Forster
It makes a difference doesn't it, whether we fully fence ourselves in, or whether we are fenced out by the barriers of others?
E. M. Forster
One grows accustomed to being praised, or being blamed, or being advised, but it is unusual to be understood.
E. M. Forster
I have said that each aspect of the novel demands a different quality of the reader. Well, the prophetic aspect demands two qualities: humility and the suspension of the sense of humour.
E. M. Forster
But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.
E. M. Forster
This element of surprise or mystery the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called is of great importance in a plot.
E. M. Forster
Ulysses ... is a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell.
E. M. Forster
The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken.
E. M. Forster
When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you're always protecting me... I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can't I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A woman's place!
E. M. Forster
When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.
E. M. Forster
