Quotes By E. M. Forster

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.

The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.

The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.

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.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.

Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.

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.

The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.

At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.

The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance.

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

The woman who can't influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself.

England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.

History develops, art stands still.

Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.

Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!

For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.

I am certainly an ought and not a must.

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.

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.

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.

One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.

Ideas are fatal to caste.