E. M. Forster Quotes

A friendliness, as of dwarfs shaking hands, was in the air...

We may still contrive to raise three cheers for democracy, although at present she only deserves two...

While her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to tea

Too late... everything's always too late.

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

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

It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an offi...

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

Our life on earth is and ought to be material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage ou...

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art men can only make us feel small in the w...

What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our d...

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

In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subco...

Love is always being given where it is not required.

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a n...

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

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

Failure and success seem to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of w...

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

Chicago - a facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade every type of dubiousness.

History develops, art stands still.

An efficiency-regime cannot be run without a few heroes stuck about it to carry off the dullness - m...

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

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

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

An acquaintance had become a lover, might become a husband, but would retain all that she had noted ...

Mr Abrahams was a preparatory schoolmaster of the old-fashioned sort. He cared neither for work nor ...

A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.

I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever an...

Conse­quently the Wolfenden recommendations will be indefinitely rejected, police prosecutions will...

I was brought up to be honest; the trouble is it gets me nowhere." Liking her better, he smiled and ...

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sp...

And Englishmen like posing as gods.

The novelist defines the story with the following example: If you are told that the king died and th...

Nothing ever happens to me, " she reflected..... An older person at such an hour and in such a place...

Standing each by his monster, they looked at each other, and smiled

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

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

Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a gre...

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

Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present gene...

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

A book is a mirror; if an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to peer out.

Either life entails courage or it ceases to be life.

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

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

The Machine is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition: the Machine is omnipotent, eternal...

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

I did not fear that I might tread upon a live rail and be killed. I feared something far more intang...

The Machine stops.""What do you say?""The Machine is stopping, I know it, I know the signs."She burs...

He will work off his crudities in time. I rather mistrust young men who slip into life gracefully.

School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend th...

Most of the inhabitants of India do not mind how India is governed. Nor are the lower animals of Eng...

-while beyond the barrier Maurice wandered, the wrong words on his lips and the wrong desires in his...

Italy and London are the only places where I don't feel to exist on sufferance.

I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult...

The Waves is an extraordinary achievement ... It is trembling on the edge. A little less - and it wo...

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gon...

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or...

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

But the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable.

I was yours once till death if you cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now--I can't hang about ...

No; look out for the part where you think you have done with the goblins and they come back,' breath...

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order...

Some reviews give pain. This is regrettable, but no author has the right to whine. He was not oblige...

He had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what the...

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art.

Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the ...

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

Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face.... The beauty w...

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessiona...

And if insight were sufficient, if the inner life were the whole of life, their happiness has been a...

Gray clouds were charging across tissues of white, which stretched and shredded and tore slowly, unt...

I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.

And Aziz in an awful rage danced this way and that, not knowing what to do, and cried: "Down with th...

In every remark he found a meaning, but not always the true meaning, and his life, though vivid, was...

The issues Miss Quested had raised were so much more important than she was herself that people inev...

It never bored them to hear words, words; they breathed them with the cool night air, never stopping...

I'd far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.

He had no racial feeling—not because he was superior to his brother civilians, but because he had ma...

I think everyone fails, but there are so many kinds of failure.

There are different ways of evil and I prefer mine to yours.

Adventures do occur, but not punctually.

Why can't we be friends now?" said the other, holding him affectionately. "It's what I want. It's wh...

How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in...

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intell...

Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to sav...

George had turned at the sound of her arrival. For a moment he contemplated her, as one who had fall...

They chose to regard it as a miraculous preservation.

Travel was a species of warfare.

Men were not gods after all, but as human and as clumsy as girls.

…”The Emersons who were at Florence, do you mean? No, I don’t suppose it will prove to be them. It i...

Then she lay on her back and gazed at the cloudless sky. Mr. Beebe, whose opinion of her rose daily,...

As her time in Florence drew to a close she was only at ease amongst those to whom she felt indiffer...

My father says that there is only one perfect view — the view of the sky straight over our heads, an...

A matter neither sensual nor sensational is ignored by the art of today.

There is much that is immortal in this medieval lady. The dragons have gone, and so have the knights...

This desire to govern a woman -- it lies very deep, and men and women must fight it together.... But...

He was driven to use the prerogatives of his profession, to act the parson.