110+ E. M. Forster Quotes (Social, Emotional And Insightful)

E. M. Forster was an English novelist, essayist and short story writer. He is best known for his novels A Room with a View, Howards End, and A Passage to India. His works often explore class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society.

Top 10 E. M. Forster Quotes

1. We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
2. One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.
3. Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown
4. 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.
5. Ideas are fatal to caste.
6. Pathos, piety, courage, they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.
7. If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
8. One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
9. Outside the arch, always there seemed another arch. And beyond the remotest echo, a silence.
10. Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

E. M. Forster Image Quotes

Ideas are fatal to caste. — E. M. Forster

E. M. Forster Short Quotes

• Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.
• A facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade, every type of dubiousness.
• At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
• Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.
• Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
• One's favorite book is as elusive as one's favorite pudding.
• In the creative state a man is taken out of himself.
• We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.
• Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.
• Death destroys a man, the idea of Death saves him.

E. M. Forster Famous Quotes And Sayings

Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West. — E. M. Forster

Ideas are fatal to caste. — E. M. Forster

The idea that nations should love one another, or that business concerns or marketing boards should love one another, or that a man in Portugal should love a man in Peru of whom he has never heard --it is absurd, unreal, dangerous. The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. — E. M. Forster

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine. — 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

It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal. — 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

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. — E. M. Forster

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. — E. M. Forster

Human relations are impossible. When they are real they are uncomfortable, and when they are comfortable they are unreal. It was for the journey into solitude that the human soul was created. — E. M. Forster

The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken. — 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

It makes a difference doesn't it, whether we fully fence ourselves in, or whether we are fenced out by the barriers of others? — E. M. Forster

The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul. — E. M. Forster

...the true spirit of gastronomic joylessness. Porridge fills the Englishman up, and prunes clear him out. — 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 believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place. — E. M. Forster

Don't believe those lies about intellectual people. They're only written to soothe the majority. — 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

Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another. — E. M. Forster

Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something. — E. M. Forster

Adventures do occur, but not punctually. — E. M. Forster

There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos. — E. M. Forster

Books have to be read it is the only way of discovering what they contain. — E. M. Forster

No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour. — E. M. Forster

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

For it is a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone. — 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

A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned. — 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 was not that ladies were inferior to men; it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself she would be first censured, then despised, and finally ignored. — 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

I do like Christmas on the whole.... In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year. — 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

It isn't possible to love and to part. — 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

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. — E. M. Forster

It is easy to sympathize at a distance,' said an old gentleman with a beard. 'I value more the kind word that is spoken close to my ear. — E. M. Forster

Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull. — E. M. Forster

Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer — E. M. Forster

Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership. — E. M. Forster

I believe we shall come to care about people less and less. The more people one knows the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London. — E. M. Forster

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent. — E. M. Forster

They had nothing in common but the English language. — 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

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

Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand. — E. M. Forster

Hope, politeness, the blowing of a nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce "boum. — 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

It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven. — E. M. Forster

It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools. — E. M. Forster

School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible. — 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

The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink. — E. M. Forster

Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them. — 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

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch. — E. M. Forster

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice. — E. M. Forster

Just as words have two functions - information and creation - so each human mind has two personalities, one on the surface, one deeper down. The upper personality... is conscious and alert... The lower personality is a... perfect fool, but without it there is no literature. — E. M. Forster

You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. — E. M. Forster

Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time. — E. M. Forster

She must be assured that it is not a criminal offense to love at first sight. — E. M. Forster

Only connect!...Only connect the prose and the passion. — E. M. Forster

I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave. — E. M. Forster

I don't think literature will be purged until its philosophic pretentiousness is extruded, and I shant live to see that purge, nor perhaps when it has happened will anything survive. — E. M. Forster

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world. — E. M. Forster

It is now only in letters I write what I feel: not in literature any more, and I seldom say it, because I keep trying to be amusing. — E. M. Forster

At the moment they vanished they were everywhere, the cool benediction of the night descended, the stars sparkled, and the whole universe was a hill. — E. M. Forster

In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art. — E. M. Forster

The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty. — E. M. Forster

To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it. — E. M. Forster

I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal. — E. M. Forster

It is so difficult - at least, I find it difficult - to understand people who speak the truth. — E. M. Forster

Excuse my mistakes, realize my limitations. Life is not easy as we know it on the earth. — E. M. Forster

Then she lay on her back and gazed at the cloudless sky. Mr. Beebe, whose opinion of her rose daily, whispered to his niece that that was the proper way to behave if any little thing went wrong. — E. M. Forster

Lord I disbelieve -- help thou my unbelief. — 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

Roger Fry is painting me. It is too like me at present, but he is confident he will be able to alter that. Post-Impressionism is at present confined to my lower lip... and to my chin. — E. M. Forster

Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom. — E. M. Forster

No disease of the imagination is so difficult to cure, as that which is complicated with the dread of guilt : fancy and conscience then act interchangeably upon us, and so often shift their places, that the illusions of one are not distinguished from the dictates of the other. — 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

The traveller who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it. — E. M. Forster

Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety. — E. M. Forster

Science explained people, but could not understand them. After long centuries among the bones and muscles it might be advancing to knowledge of the nerves, but this would never give understanding — E. M. Forster

They cared for no one, they were outside humanity, and death, had it come, would only have continued their pursuit of a retreating horizon. — E. M. Forster

A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life. — E. M. Forster

A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man. — E. M. Forster

This desire to govern a woman -- it lies very deep, and men and women must fight it together.... But I do love you surely in a better way then he does." He thought. "Yes -- really in a better way. I want you to have your own thoughts even when I hold you in my arms. — E. M. Forster

The crime of suicide lies rather in its disregard for the feelings of those whom we leave behind. — E. M. Forster

Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it. — E. M. Forster

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. — E. M. Forster

Life Lessons by E. M. Forster

1. E. M. Forster encourages us to be open-minded and tolerant of others, no matter their differences. He also urges us to be true to ourselves and to be willing to take risks in order to live a life of purpose and meaning.
2. He believed that relationships are the most important things in life, and that we should cherish and nurture them.
3. Finally, he taught that we should never stop learning, growing, and exploring, and that we should strive to make the world a better place.