E. M. Forster Quotes (88 Quotes)

Ideas are fatal to caste.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.

Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.

Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.

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.

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.

So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

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

I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.

Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.

The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.

I am certainly an ought and not a must.

The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.

One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.

History develops, art stands still.

I'm a holy man minus the holiness.

Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.

Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.

Love is always being given where it is not required.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.

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.

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.

Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.

How can I know what I think till I see what I say?

Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.

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.

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.

What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?

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.

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.

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.

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.

The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.

But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else.

Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.

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.

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.

England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.

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.

If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.

Reverence is fatal to literature.

The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.