Edward M. Forster

(486 votes)   If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

Edward M. Forster
1879-1970, British Novelist, Essayist

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(287 votes)   I believe we shall come to care about people less and less. The more people one knows the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London.

Edward M. Forster
1879-1970, British Novelist, Essayist

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(219 votes)   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 M. Forster
1879-1970, British Novelist, Essayist

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(183 votes)   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 M. Forster
1879-1970, British Novelist, Essayist

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(179 votes)   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.

Edward M. Forster
1879-1970, British Novelist, Essayist

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(177 votes)   Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due -- she reminds us too much of a prima donna.

Edward M. Forster
1879-1970, British Novelist, Essayist

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(174 votes)   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 M. Forster
1879-1970, British Novelist, Essayist

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(157 votes)   Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.

Edward M. Forster
1879-1970, British Novelist, Essayist

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(156 votes)   Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish! How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?

Edward M. Forster
1879-1970, British Novelist, Essayist

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(143 votes)   The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.

Edward M. Forster
1879-1970, British Novelist, Essayist

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

Edward M. Forster
1879-1970, British Novelist, Essayist

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(134 votes)   There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.

Edward M. Forster
1879-1970, British Novelist, Essayist

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(132 votes)   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 M. Forster
1879-1970, British Novelist, Essayist

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(128 votes)   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 M. Forster
1879-1970, British Novelist, Essayist

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(127 votes)   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 M. Forster
1879-1970, British Novelist, Essayist

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