E. M. Forster's Quotes

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

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

England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.

I am certainly an ought and not a must.

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

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.

Ideas are fatal to caste.

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

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

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

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.

Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.

No one is India.

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

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

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

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.

Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.

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.

Reverence is fatal to literature.

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

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

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

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

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Love is always being given where it is not required.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!

History develops, art stands still.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.