Forster, Edward M. Quotes

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Lord I disbelieve -- help thou my unbelief.

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

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.

I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I'd like to be.

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

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.

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.

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

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