Quote: The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves. [Edward Forster]
Quote: One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it. [Edward Forster]
Quote: I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves. [Edward Forster]
Quote: Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom. [Edward Forster]
Quote: Failure or success seem to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is this wriggle. [Edward Forster]
Quote: 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. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly silent. [Edward Forster]
Quote: Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy. [Edward Forster]
Quote: Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. [Edward Forster]
Quote: Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die. [Edward Forster]
Quote: A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man. [Edward Forster]
Quote: At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity. [Edward Forster]
Quote: Death destroys a man, the idea of Death saves him. [Edward Forster]
Quote: Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon. [Edward Forster]
Quote: Oxford is -- Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another. [Edward Forster]
Quote: The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define. [Edward Forster]
Quote: The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius. [Edward Forster]
Quote: 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. [Edward Forster]
Quote: Unless we remember we cannot understand. [Edward Forster]
Quote: The idea that nations should love one another, or that business concerns or marketing boards should love one another, or that a man in Portugal should love a man in Peru of whom he has never heard --it is absurd, unreal, dangerous. The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. [Edward Forster]
Quote: As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take this examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one would be a penny the stupider. [Edward Forster]
Quote: Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. [Edward Forster]
Quote: Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish! How can I tell what I think till I see what I say? [Edward Forster]
Quote: Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership. [Edward Forster]
Quote: Ideas are fatal to caste. [Edward Forster]
Quote: The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink. [Edward Forster]