Ideas are fatal to caste.
— E. M. Forster
So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.
One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
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.
How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
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.
Unless we remember we cannot understand.
There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.
Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.
Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.
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.
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?
I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.
At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes.
Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.
Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper.
At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for. It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large.
We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.
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.
Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.
To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.
Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's.
Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.
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.
One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
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.
Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
I am so used to seeing the sort of play which deals with one man and two women. They do not leave me with the feeling I have made a full theatrical meal they do not give me the experience of the multiplicity of life.
Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.
If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
