We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
E. M. Forster
The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.
The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.
How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
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.
Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.
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.
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.
The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
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.
Unless we remember we cannot understand.
History develops, art stands still.
One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
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.
So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.
Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's.
Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.
Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes.
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.
Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.
Love is always being given where it is not required.
Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.
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.
Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.
Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.
Ideas are fatal to caste.
Two cheers for Democracy; one because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism.
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.
One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.
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.
I'm a holy man minus the holiness.
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.
Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.
Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.
The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.
No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.
Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.
The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.
The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.
It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.
One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions.
Reverence is fatal to literature.
