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
Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Belief, Faith
At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Dignity
Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Caution
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
Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Cities, City Life
As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take this examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one would be a penny the stupider.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Education
Another distinguished critic has agreed with Gide—that old lady in the anecdote who was accused by her niece of being illogical. For some time she could not be brought to understand what logic was, and when she grasped its true nature she was not so much angry as contemptuous. ‘Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!’ she exclaimed. ‘How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?’ Her nieces, educated young women, thought that she was pass
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Logic
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
The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Purpose, Meaning
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: Colleges, Education, Universities
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
How do I know what I think, until I hear what I say?
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Think, Now
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
Failure and success seem to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is this wriggle.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Destiny, Luck, Success & Failure, Fate, Fortune
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
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
The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Organization
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
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
Topics: Reading, Literature
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
Topics: Praise
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.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Historians, History
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
One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Trust, Friendship
Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
—E. M. Forster
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: Authors & Writing, Fiction
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
Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Vulgarity, Profanity, Swearing
One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Books, Reading
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
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
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
Unless we remember we cannot understand.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Memory
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
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
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
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
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
Topics: Art
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
Topics: Love
Life—No, I’ve nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Life and Living
Ideas are fatal to caste.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Ideas
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