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E. M. Forster [1879-1970] English

Rank: 101
Novelist

Edward Morgan Forster OM CH, better known by his pen name E. M. Forster, was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist.

Art, Beauty, Life, Poetry, Brainy, Courage, Faith, Food, Good, History, Love, Mom, Nature, Trust, Women

Quote	Tags	Rank
What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?	Good, Nature	101
One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.		102
Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's.		103
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.	Life	104
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.	Art	105
Nonsense and beauty have close connections.	Beauty	106
Unless we remember we cannot understand.	Brainy	107
One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.	Trust	108
The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.	Poetry	109
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.		110
The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.		111
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.	Art	112
Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.		113
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.	Poetry	114
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.	Beauty	115
I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.	Mom	116
Ideas are fatal to caste.		117
There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.		118
History develops, art stands still.	History	119
The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.		120
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.		121
We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.		122
At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes.		123
Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.		124
Love is always being given where it is not required.	Love	125
Two cheers for Democracy; one because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism.		126
The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.		201
Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.		202
Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.	Courage	203
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.		204
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.		205
We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.		206
Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.		207
Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.		208
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.		209
Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.		210
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.		211
The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.	Food, Life	212
Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.		213
How can I know what I think till I see what I say?		214
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.		215
Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.		216
Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.		217
Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.		218
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.		219
Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.		220
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.		221
If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.		222
One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions.		223
I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.		224
Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.	Women	225
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.		226
Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!		301
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.		302
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.		303
There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.		304
At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.		305
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.		306
Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.		307
So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.		308
If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.		309
The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.		310
The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.		311
I am certainly an ought and not a must.		312
The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.		313
The woman who can't influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself.		314
It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.		315
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.		316
We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.		317
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.		318
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.		319
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.		320
Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.		321
Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.		322
Reverence is fatal to literature.		323
It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.		324
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.		325
England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.		326
No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.		401
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.		402
But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else.		403
Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.	Faith	404
The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.		405
Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.		406
One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.		407
No one is India.		408
I'm a holy man minus the holiness.		409
One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.		410

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