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Quotes by E. M. Forster

A facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade, every type of dubiousness.
– 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
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
As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take this examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one would be a penny the stupider.
– E. M. Forster
At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
– 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
Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
– E. M. Forster
Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.
– E. M. Forster
How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
– 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
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
I have been racking my brains and can find no reply to this very reasonable question. I can only suggest that the fictional part of me dried up.
– 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
It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.
– E. M. Forster
It is the one orderly product our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths; it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden the best evidence we can give of our dignity.
– E. M. Forster
Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.
– E. M. Forster
Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.
– E. M. Forster
Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
– E. M. Forster
One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
– E. M. Forster
Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
– 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
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
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
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
They go forth with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds and undeveloped hearts. An undeveloped heart-not a cold one. The difference is important.
– E. M. Forster
This opera is my Nunc Dimittis, in that it dismisses me peacefully and convinces me I have achieved.
– 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
Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.
– E. M. Forster
Unless we remember we cannot understand.
– E. M. Forster
Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.
– 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
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
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
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
Where there is officialism every human relationship suffers.
– 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
Yes, oh dear, yes, the novel tells a story.
– E. M. Forster
But the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable.
– E. M. Forster
Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time - beautiful?
– E. M. Forster
Pathos, piety, courage, — they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.
– E. M. Forster
I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.
– E. M. Forster
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
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
The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.
– E. M. Forster
The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.
– E. M. Forster
The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.
– E. M. Forster
The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
– 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 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
One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
– E. M. Forster
One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions.
– E. M. Forster
Love is always being given where it is not required.
– E. M. Forster
I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.
– E. M. Forster
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.
– E. M. Forster
I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.
– E. M. Forster
History develops, art stands still.
– E. M. Forster
England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.
– E. M. Forster
Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.
– E. M. Forster
Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
– E. M. Forster
Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.
– E. M. Forster