E. M. Forster quotes:

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.

I am so used to seeing the sort of play which deals with one man and two women. They do not leave me with the feeling I have made a full theatrical meal they do not give me the experience of the multiplicity of life.

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

I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.

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.

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

The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.

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.

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

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

Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.

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.

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.

The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.

While her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to tea

Perhaps anything that he did would have pleased Lucy, but his awkwardness went straight to her heart.

An acquaintance had become a lover, might become a husband, but would retain all that she had noted in the acquaintance; and love must confirm an old relation rather than reveal a new one.

I do not want my voice to go out into the air while my heart is sinking.

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.

It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.

Why children?' he asked. 'Why always children? For love to end where it begins is far more beautiful, and Nature knows it.

So abased, so monotonous is everything that meets the eye, that when the Ganges comes down it might be expected to wash the excrescence back into the soil. Houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but the general outline of the town persists, welling here, shrinking there, like some low but indestructible form of life.

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."

No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.

Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West.

In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.

At the moment they vanished they were everywhere, the cool benediction of the night descended, the stars sparkled, and the whole universe was a hill.

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

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.

Ideas are fatal to caste.

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.

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.

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.

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

Expansion, that is the idea the novelist must cling to, not completion, not rounding off, but opening out.

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

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

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

Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a great mistake and degenerates into defensiveness or hypocrisy.

In time, Mr Hall, one gets to recognize that sneer, that hardness, for fornication extends far beyond the actual deed. Were it a deed only, I for one would not hold it anathema. But when the nations went a whoring they invariably ended by denying God, I think, and until all sexual irregularities and not some of them are penal the Church will never reconquer England.

But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else.

One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.

Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.

Lucy was suffering from the most grievous wrong which this world has yet discovered: diplomatic advantage had been taken of her sincerity, of her craving for sympathy and love. Such a wrong is not easily forgotten. Never again did she expose herself without due consideration and precaution against rebuff. And such a wrong may react disastrously upon the soul.

This element of surprise or mystery the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called is of great importance in a plot.

Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.

For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and - by some sad, strange irony - it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.

My law-givers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul.

Pity wraps the student of the past in an ambrosial cloud, and washes his limbs with eternal youth.

Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.

A facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade, every type of dubiousness.

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

Pathos, piety, courage, they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.

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.

Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown

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.

For you cannot have gentility without paying for it.

The traveller who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it.

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.

Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!

But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist's readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters.

I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.

I'm a holy man minus the holiness.

What the world most needs today are negative virtues - not minding people, not being huffy, touchy, irritable or revengeful.

Do not be proud of your inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped like this. It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive and truthful.

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.

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.

When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you're always protecting me... I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can't I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A woman's place!

I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.

The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death." "We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

It is obvious enough for the reader to conclude, "She loves young Emerson." A reader in Lucy's place would not find it obvious. Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice, and we welcome "nerves" or any other shibboleth that will cloak our personal desire. She loved Cecil; George made her nervous; will the reader explain to her that the phrases should have been reversed?

Excuse my mistakes, realize my limitations. Life is not easy as we know it on the earth.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.

Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.

Sex begins before adolescence, and survives sterility; it is indeed coeval with our lives, although at the mating age its effects are more obvious to Society.

Those who search for truth are too conscious of the maze to be hard on others.

I do like Christmas on the whole.... In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year.

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

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

Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull.

One doesn't come to Italy for niceness," was the retort; "one comes for life. Buon giorno! Buon giorno!

The novelist, unlike many of his colleagues, makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself (roughly: niceties shallcome later), gives them names and sex, assigns them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of inverted commas, and perhaps to behave consistently.

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

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.

She must be assured that it is not a criminal offense to love at first sight.

The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.

Money pads the edges of things.

Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.

One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.

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.

I don't think literature will be purged until its philosophic pretentiousness is extruded, and I shant live to see that purge, nor perhaps when it has happened will anything survive.

In the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life.

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

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

Only connect!...Only connect the prose and the passion.

Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer

Reverence is fatal to literature.

But why I cry out against Rubens is because he painted undressed people instead of naked ones.

It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.

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

For that little incident had impressed the three women more than might be supposed. It remained as a goblin footfall, as a hint that all is not for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and that beneath these superstructures of wealth and art there wanders an ill-fed boy, who has recovered his umbrella indeed, but who has left no address behind him, and no name.

Of all means to regeneration, Remorse is surely the most wasteful.

Margaret could not reply. Was he incredibly stupid, or did he understand her better than she understood herself?

It will be generally admitted that Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.

Don't believe those lies about intellectual people. They're only written to soothe the majority.

In every remark he found a meaning, but not always the true meaning, and his life, though vivid, was largely a dream.

Then she lay on her back and gazed at the cloudless sky. Mr. Beebe, whose opinion of her rose daily, whispered to his niece that that was the proper way to behave if any little thing went wrong.

I swear from the bottom of my heart I want to be healed. I want to be like other men, not this outcast whom nobody wants.

The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.

Maurice was scandalized, horrified. He was shocked to the bottom of his suburban soul....

You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other. "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but not everything.