Quotes By E. M. Forster

One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions.

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.

There is much good luck in the world, but it is luck. We are none of us safe. We are children, playing or quarrelling on the line.

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

We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.

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.

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.

People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.

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.

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.

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.

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

I'm a holy man minus the holiness.

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

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.

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.

One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.

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

Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.

Reverence is fatal to literature.

America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for. It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large.

Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.

What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?

Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's.

There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.

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