E. M. Forster Quotes (88 Quotes)

The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.

Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's.

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.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

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.

No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.

Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.

Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.

I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.

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.

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.

One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions.

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.

Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.

I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

No one is India.

Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.

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.

One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.

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.

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

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.

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.

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.

The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.

Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.

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.

One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.

The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.

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.

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.

The woman who can't influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself.

At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes.

It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.

We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.

At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.