Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by E. M. Forster (English Novelist)

E. M. Forster (1879–1970,) fully Edward Morgan Forster, was an influential British novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. He is best known for the novels A Room with a View (1908) and A Passage to India (1924.)

Born in London, Forster published Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905,) The Longest Journey (1907,) and A Room with a View (1908.) He hit literary success with his fourth novel, Howards End (1910,) which featured the class system in Edwardian England exposed through the lives of three families.

During a visit to India, Forster was inspired to write his masterpiece A Passage to India (1924,) about a young British schoolteacher who imagines being sexually assaulted by an Indian-Muslim doctor. She accuses him of attempted rape, but later retracts her charges. Considered one of the great novels of the 20th century, A Passage to India exposed the undercurrent of conflict and prejudice between the British and Indian cultures.

After publishing five novels before age 40, Forster never published any other novels during his lifetime. He subsequently wrote numerous short stories.

Forster wrote his sixth and last novel on the eve of World War I and considered it among his best writing, but did not want it to be published in his lifetime because of its homosexual themes. Maurice (1971) was published posthumously to great renown.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by E. M. Forster

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

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

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

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
Topics: Universities, Colleges, Education

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

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
Topics: Generosity

Two cheers for democracy one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: There is no occasion to give three.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Democracy

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
Topics: Curiosity

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
Topics: Tolerance

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
Topics: The Poor, Poverty

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
Topics: Greatness & Great Things, Greatness

Lord I disbelieve—help thou my unbelief.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Skepticism, Doubt

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. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly silent.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Career

Think before you speak is criticism’s motto; speak before you think, creation’s.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Criticism

The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Purpose, Meaning

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
Topics: Beauty

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

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Communication

Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: City Life, Cities

At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Dignity

Death destroys a man, the idea of Death saves him.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Death, Dying

There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Belief

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Reading, Books

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
Topics: Consumerism

I distrust great men…. I believe in aristocracy, though. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between them when they meet…. They are sensitive for others as well as for themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but the power to endure and they can take a joke.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Class

I hate the idea of causes, and 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
Topics: Betrayal, Loyalty

Art for art’s sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden… it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Art, Artists, Arts

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.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing

I suggest that 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 gone ourselves.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Books, Reading

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
Topics: Character

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