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
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
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
Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: City Life, Cities
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
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
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
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
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, Universities, Education
The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Purpose, Meaning
Unless we remember we cannot understand.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Memory
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
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
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
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 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
Death destroys a man, the idea of Death saves him.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Death, Dying
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: Literature, Reading
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
Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Writers, Writing, Authors & Writing
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
One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Books, Reading
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
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
Lord I disbelieve—help thou my unbelief.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Doubt, Skepticism
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: Poverty, The Poor
Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.
—E. M. Forster
Topics: Caution
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
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, Arts, Artists
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Virginia Woolf English Novelist
- J. G. Ballard English Novelist
- D. H. Lawrence English Novelist
- Jeanette Winterson English Novelist
- Aldous Huxley English Humanist
- Margaret Drabble English Novelist
- Vita Sackville-West British Writer
- Anthony Powell English Novelist
- George Gissing English Novelist
- Arthur Conan Doyle Scottish Writer
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