E. M. Forster quote: "I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country"

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for...
E. M. FORSTER

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.
E. M. FORSTER

What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our d...
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 ...
E. M. FORSTER

History develops, art stands still.
E. M. FORSTER

How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
E. M. FORSTER

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

Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's.
E. M. FORSTER

We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.
E. M. FORSTER

The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in...
E. M. FORSTER

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

Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.
E. M. FORSTER

Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to l...
E. M. FORSTER

Two cheers for Democracy; one because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism.
E. M. FORSTER

Love is always being given where it is not required.
E. M. FORSTER

The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in...
E. M. FORSTER

Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.
E. M. FORSTER

I'm a holy man minus the holiness.
E. M. FORSTER

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing ...
E. M. FORSTER

The idea that nations should love one another, or that business concerns or marketing boards should ...
E. M. FORSTER

Death destroys a man, the idea of Death saves him.
E. M. FORSTER

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of an...
E. M. FORSTER

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
E. M. FORSTER

Unless we remember we cannot understand.
E. M. FORSTER

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the stat...
E. M. FORSTER

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
E. M. FORSTER

America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for. It will probably be inter...
E. M. FORSTER

There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one d...
E. M. FORSTER

Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who ...
E. M. FORSTER

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both wil...
E. M. FORSTER

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

I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people...
E. M. FORSTER

Ideas are fatal to caste.
E. M. FORSTER

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orde...
E. M. FORSTER

Failure or success seem to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wr...
E. M. FORSTER

As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through e...
E. M. FORSTER

Oxford is -- Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates t...
E. M. FORSTER

Lord I disbelieve -- help thou my unbelief.
E. M. FORSTER

Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when...
E. M. FORSTER

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sp...
E. M. FORSTER

I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too,...
E. M. FORSTER

The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will ...
E. M. FORSTER

A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy d...
E. M. FORSTER

Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; ...
E. M. FORSTER

Tolerance is a very dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is neg...
E. M. FORSTER

The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.
E. M. FORSTER

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the gu...
E. M. FORSTER

Another distinguished critic has agreed with Gide--that old lady in the anecdote who was accused by ...
E. M. FORSTER

At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
E. M. FORSTER

Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.
E. M. FORSTER

Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality...
E. M. FORSTER

Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of...
E. M. FORSTER

The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the ...
E. M. FORSTER

Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage ou...
E. M. FORSTER

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
E. M. FORSTER

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gon...
E. M. FORSTER

They go too far because they do not reflect what personality is. Just as words have two functions - ...
E. M. FORSTER

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
E. M. FORSTER

I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.
E. M. FORSTER

But the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable.
E. M. FORSTER

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order...
E. M. FORSTER

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a n...
E. M. FORSTER

Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventu...
E. M. FORSTER

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

So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.
E. M. FORSTER

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.
E. M. FORSTER

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.
E. M. FORSTER

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of ma...
E. M. FORSTER

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

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
E. M. FORSTER

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the cond...
E. M. FORSTER

. . . the crime of suicide lies rather in its disregard for the feelings of those whom we leave behi...
E. M. FORSTER

Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageab...
E. M. FORSTER

Pathos, piety, courage, they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothin...
E. M. FORSTER

Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the ...
E. M. FORSTER

Life -- No, I've nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.
E. M. FORSTER

I believe we shall come to care about people less and less. The more people one knows the easier it ...
E. M. FORSTER

Only connect.
E. M. FORSTER

The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.
E. M. FORSTER

Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what t...
E. M. FORSTER

So, Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism
E. M. FORSTER

It is the one orderly product our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels,...
E. M. FORSTER

There is much good luck in the world, but it is luck. We are none of us safe. We are children, playi...
E. M. FORSTER

They go forth with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds and undeveloped hearts. An undevelo...
E. M. FORSTER

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gon...
E. M. FORSTER

Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that shoul...
E. M. FORSTER

The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little fart...
E. M. FORSTER

I have been racking my brains and can find no reply [to] this very reasonable question. I can only s...
E. M. FORSTER

A facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade, every type of dubiousness.
E. M. FORSTER

I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people...
E. M. FORSTER

For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge tha...
E. M. FORSTER

The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.
E. M. FORSTER

The best way to know Alexandria is to wander aimlessly
E. M. FORSTER

Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.
E. M. FORSTER

If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.
E. M. FORSTER

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

You remember how he would trust strangers, and if they fooled him he would say, 'It's better to be f...
E. M. FORSTER

But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to mer...
E. M. FORSTER

Unless we remember we cannot understand
E. M. FORSTER

It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the...
E. M. FORSTER

The so-called white races are really pinko-grey
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...
E. M. FORSTER

I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.
E. M. FORSTER

At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes
E. M. FORSTER

Away she hurried, not beautiful, not supremely brilliant, but filled with something that took the pl...
E. M. FORSTER

Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's
E. M. FORSTER

Some twenty years her senior, he preserved a gift that she supposed herself to have already lost--no...
E. M. FORSTER

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

Ideas are fatal to caste
E. M. FORSTER

Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.
E. M. FORSTER

Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who ...
E. M. FORSTER

It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.
E. M. FORSTER

Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.
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.
E. M. FORSTER

Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.
E. M. FORSTER

England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.
E. M. FORSTER

I never could get on with representative individuals but people who existed on their own account and...
E. M. FORSTER

Reverence is fatal to literature.
E. M. FORSTER

Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.
E. M. FORSTER

One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such exp...
E. M. FORSTER

People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, ...
E. M. FORSTER

No one is India.
E. M. FORSTER

The woman who can't influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herse...
E. M. FORSTER

I am certainly an ought and not a must.
E. M. FORSTER

It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.
E. M. FORSTER

The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that ...
E. M. FORSTER

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

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
E. M. FORSTER

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

No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.
E. M. FORSTER

Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.
E. M. FORSTER

At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes.
E. M. FORSTER

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

I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too,...
E. M. FORSTER

The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a p...
E. M. FORSTER

One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
E. M. FORSTER

Some closing of the gates is inevitable after thirty, if the mind itself is to become a creative pow...
E. M. FORSTER

I believe we shall come to care about people less and less. The more people one knows the easier it ...
EDWARD M. FORSTER

Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something...
EDWARD M. FORSTER

Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; ...
EDWARD M. FORSTER

Lord I disbelieve -- help thou my unbelief.
EDWARD M. FORSTER

Unless we remember we cannot understand.
EDWARD M. FORSTER

Ideas are fatal to caste.
EDWARD M. FORSTER

Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage ou...
EDWARD M. FORSTER

Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when...
EDWARD M. FORSTER

At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
EDWARD M. FORSTER

The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the ...
EDWARD M. FORSTER

Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
E. M. CIORAN

The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.
E. M. CIORAN

If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
E. M. CIORAN

The difference between a boss and a leader: a boss says, 'Go!' - a leader says, 'Let's go!'
E. M. KELLY

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland --and n...
E. M. CIORAN

Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people...
E. M. CIORAN

A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its se...
E. M. CIORAN

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal ther...
E. M. CIORAN

Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
E. M. CIORAN

A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals h...
E. M. CIORAN

Few persons are made of such strong fiber that they will make a costly outlay when surface work will...
E. M. BOUNDS

Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations ...
E. M. CIORAN

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
E. M. CIORAN

To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
E. M. CIORAN

Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untain...
E. M. CIORAN

A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
E. M. CIORAN

God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
E. M. CIORAN

Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent --unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaus...
E. M. CIORAN

What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striv...
E. M. CIORAN

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
E. M. CIORAN

When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances,...
E. M. CIORAN

It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
E. M. CIORAN

The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose atte...
E. M. CIORAN

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not fi...
E. M. CIORAN

Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ours...
E. M. CIORAN

Those who believe in their truth -- the only ones whose imprint is retained by the memory of men -- ...
E. M. CIORAN

What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
E. M. CIORAN

Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
E. M. CIORAN

Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist --a demo...
E. M. CIORAN

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.
E. M. CIORAN

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are ...
E. M. CIORAN

We derive our vitality from our store of madness.
E. M. CIORAN

The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, th...
E. M. CIORAN

Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than...
E. M. CIORAN

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.
E. M. CIORAN

Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
E. M. CIORAN

To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.
E. M. CIORAN

No one can keep his grieves in their prime; they use themselves up.
E. M. CIORAN

The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for on...
E. M. CIORAN

Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.
E. M. CIORAN

We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone wo...
E. M. CIORAN

The difference between a boss and a leader: a boss says, 'Go!' -a leader says, 'Let's go!'.
E. M. KELLY

Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.
E. M. CIORAN

Much more than our other needs and endeavors, it is sexuality that puts us on an even footing with o...
E. M. CIORAN

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal the...
E. M. CIORAN

The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for on...
E. M. CIORAN

Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encount...
E. M. CIORAN

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal ther...
E. M. CIORAN

Earnestness is good and impressive: genius is gifted and great. Thought kindles and inspires, but it...
E. M. BOUNDS

Prayer is the creator as well as the channel of devotion. The spirit of devotion is the spirit of pr...
E. M. BOUNDS

We love orthodoxy. It is good. It is the best. It is the clean, clear cut teaching of God's Word, th...
E. M. BOUNDS

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
E. M. CIORAN

There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
E. M. CIORAN

I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country

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E. M. Forster

I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country

E. M. Forster

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