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

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

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: Faith, Belief

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

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

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

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: Reading, Books

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

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

Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Vulgarity, Profanity, Swearing

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

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

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

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

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

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing, Writing

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 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

How do I know what I think, until I hear what I say?
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Now, Think

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

One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Friendship, Trust

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

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

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

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

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: Loyalty, Betrayal

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

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

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

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

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, Education, Colleges

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