Top 398 Quotes & Sayings by E. M. Forster

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English writer E. M. Forster.

Last updated on December 26, 2024.

Edward Morgan Forster was an English fiction writer, essayist, and librettist. Many of his novels examine class difference and hypocrisy, including A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), and A Passage to India (1924). The last brought him his greatest success. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 20 separate years.

English - Writer | January 1, 1879 - June 7, 1970

Source: Wikipedia

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

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

E. M. Forster

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

E. M. Forster

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

E. M. Forster

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

E. M. Forster

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.

E. M. Forster

England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.

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

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

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

E. M. Forster

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

E. M. Forster

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

E. M. Forster

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

E. M. Forster

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.

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

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.

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

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

No one is India.

E. M. Forster

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

E. M. Forster

Ideas are fatal to caste.

E. M. Forster

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

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

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

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

E. M. Forster

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

E. M. Forster

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

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

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

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

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

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

E. M. Forster

Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

E. M. Forster

I'm a holy man minus the holiness.

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

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

E. M. Forster

Love is always being given where it is not required.

E. M. Forster

History develops, art stands still.

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

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

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

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

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

E. M. Forster

Two cheers for Democracy; one because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism.

E. M. Forster

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

E. M. Forster

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

E. M. Forster

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

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

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

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

E. M. Forster

Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!

E. M. Forster

Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.

E. M. Forster

I am certainly an ought and not a must.

E. M. Forster