E. M. Forster: Ideas are fatal to caste.

I'm a holy man minus the holiness. Hand that on to your three spies, and tell them to put it in their pipes.

E. M. Forster

spy men hands

One grows accustomed to being praised, or being blamed, or being advised, but it is unusual to be understood.

E. M. Forster

unusual understood grows

. . . life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t'other from which . . .

E. M. Forster

life-is sometimes drama

Science explained people, but could not understand them. After long centuries among the bones and muscles it might be advancing to knowledge of the nerves, but this would never give understanding

E. M. Forster

science long knowledge

Growing old is an emotion which comes over us at almost any age; I had it myself between the ages of 25 and 30.

E. M. Forster

growing emotion age

The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power.

E. M. Forster

sensitive want people

Sudden conversion ... is particularly attractive to the half-baked mind.

E. M. Forster

atheism half mind

Pathos, piety, courage, they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.

E. M. Forster

pathos filth piety

But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.

E. M. Forster

progress humanity mean

Love felt and returned, love which our bodies exact and our hearts have transfigured, love which is the most real thing that we shall ever meet, reappeared now as the world's enemy, and she must stifle it.

E. M. Forster

real heart enemy

Was Mrs. Wilcox one of the unsatisfactory people- there are many of them- who dangle intimacy and then withdraw it? They evoke our interests and affections, and keep the life of the spirit dawdling around them. Then they withdraw. When physical passion is involved, there is a definite name for such behaviour- flirting- and if carried far enough, it is punishable by law. But no law- not public opinion, even- punishes those who coquette with friendship, though the dull ache that they inflict, the sense of misdirected effort and exhaustion, may be as intolerable. Was she one of these?

E. M. Forster

flirting passion law

One minute. You know nothing about him. He probably has his own joys and interests- wife, children, snug little home. That's where we practical fellows'- he smiled-'are more tolerant than you intellectuals. We live and let live, and assume that things are jogging on fairly well elsewhere, and that the ordinary plain man may be trusted to look after his own affairs.

E. M. Forster

home men children

You told me once that we shall be judged by our intentions, not by our accomplishments. I thought it a grand remark. But we must intend to accomplish - not sit intending on a chair.

E. M. Forster

intention chairs accomplishment

Let her go to Italy!" he cried. "Let her meddle with what she doesn't understand!

E. M. Forster

let-her-go cried

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.

E. M. Forster

funeral men death

The sun was already declining and each of the trees held a premonition of night.

E. M. Forster

sun tree night

Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.

E. M. Forster

forget people thinking

We move between two darknesses.

E. M. Forster

darkness two moving

By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes--a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.

E. M. Forster

room-with-a-view everlasting sides

Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?

E. M. Forster

finding-happiness boxes should