E. M. Forster Quotes | GloryQuotes

E. M. Forster Quotes About Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

E. M. Forster Quotes About Love

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

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.

Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.

Love is always being given where it is not required.

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.

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.

More Quotes by 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.

Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.

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

The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.

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

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

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

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

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

No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.

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

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

The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else.

Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.

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

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

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

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

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

England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.

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

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

Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.

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.

Browse 89 quotes attributed to E. M. Forster, listed in the source data as a English Novelist, organized around themes such as Life, Love, Art. Use the topic links to explore similar quotes, or browse the full author collection in one place.