Top 88 E. M. Forster Quotes December 20, 2020 by Krista Aniston Leave a Comment “What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?”― E. M. Forster“How can I know what I think till I see what I say?”― E. M. Forster“The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.”― E. M. Forster“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.”― E. M. Forster“We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.”― E. M. Forster“The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.”― E. M. Forster“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“Nonsense and beauty have close connections.”― E. M. Forster“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”― E. M. Forster“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.”― E. M. Forster“Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.”― E. M. Forster“Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.”― E. M. Forster“Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.”― E. M. Forster“Think before you speak is criticism’s motto; speak before you think, creation’s.”― E. M. Forster“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.”― E. M. Forster“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.”― E. M. Forster“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.”― E. M. Forster“Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.”― E. M. Forster“So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.”― E. M. Forster“Ideas are fatal to caste.”― E. M. Forster“I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.”― E. M. Forster“What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.”― E. M. Forster“The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance.”― E. M. Forster“If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.”― E. M. Forster“The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.”― E. M. Forster“People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.”― E. M. Forster“Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.”― E. M. Forster“The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.”― E. M. Forster“One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.”― E. M. Forster“Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.”― E. M. Forster“Unless we remember we cannot understand.”― E. M. Forster“At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.”― E. M. Forster“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.”― E. M. Forster“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.”― E. M. Forster“There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.”― E. M. Forster“We are all like Scheherazade’s husband, in that we want to know what happens next.”― E. M. Forster“Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.”― E. M. Forster“Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.”― E. M. Forster“Reverence is fatal to literature.”― E. M. Forster“For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.”― E. M. Forster“But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else.”― E. M. Forster“Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!”― E. M. Forster“I’m a holy man minus the holiness.”― E. M. Forster“Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.”― E. M. Forster“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.”― E. M. Forster“It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.”― E. M. Forster“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.”― E. M. Forster“We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.”― E. M. Forster“Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.”― E. M. Forster“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.”― E. M. Forster“There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.”― E. M. Forster“One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.”― E. M. Forster“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.”― E. M. Forster“Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.”― E. M. Forster“Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.”― E. M. Forster“A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.”― E. M. Forster“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.”― E. M. Forster“At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes.”― E. M. Forster“I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.”― E. M. Forster“There is much good luck in the world, but it is luck. We are none of us safe. We are children, playing or quarrelling on the line.”― E. M. Forster“One is certain of nothing but the truth of one’s own emotions.”― E. M. Forster“The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.”― E. M. Forster“Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.”― E. M. Forster“The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.”― E. M. Forster“Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.”― E. M. Forster“The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.”― E. M. Forster“Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.”― E. M. Forster“One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.”― E. M. Forster“Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.”― E. M. Forster“No one is India.”― E. M. Forster“Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.”― E. M. Forster“History develops, art stands still.”― E. M. Forster“Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.”― E. M. Forster“It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.”― E. M. Forster“I am certainly an ought and not a must.”― E. M. Forster“One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.”― E. M. Forster“The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can’t touch.”― E. M. Forster“Love is always being given where it is not required.”― E. M. Forster“I never could get on with representative individuals but people who existed on their own account and with whom it might therefore be possible to be friends.”― E. M. Forster“Two cheers for Democracy; one because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism.”― E. M. Forster“The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.”― E. M. Forster“Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.”― E. M. Forster“Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.”― E. M. Forster“England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.”― E. M. Forster“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.”― E. M. Forster“No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.”― E. M. Forster“The woman who can’t influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself.”― E. M. Forster“Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.”― E. M. Forster
Leave a Reply