E. M. Forster Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von E. M. Forster:

The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.

No one is India.

E. M. Forster

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

E. M. Forster

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

E. M. Forster

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

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.

E. M. Forster

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

E. M. Forster

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

E. M. Forster

But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else.

E. M. Forster

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.

E. M. Forster

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

E. M. Forster

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.

E. M. Forster

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.

E. M. Forster

Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.

E. M. Forster

I never could get on with representative individuals but people who existed on their own account and with whom it might therefore be possible to be friends.

E. M. Forster

I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.

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.

E. M. Forster

Tolerance is a very dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is negative. It merely means putting up with people, being able to stand things.

E. M. Forster

Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return.

E. M. Forster

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

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

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

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 anything else which we cannot define.

E. M. Forster

Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!

E. M. Forster

Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.

E. M. Forster

I'm a holy man minus the holiness.

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.

E. M. Forster

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

E. M. Forster

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

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

What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?

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

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.

E. M. Forster

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

E. M. Forster

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

E. M. Forster

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

E. M. Forster