E.M. Forster Quotes

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

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

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

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.

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

Ideas are fatal to caste.

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

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

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

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

Outside the arch, always there seemed another arch. And beyond the remotest echo, a silence.

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

Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.

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

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

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

You confuse what's important with what's impressive.

People talk about escapism as though it's something nasty but escapism is wonderful!

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.

Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.

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

Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form.

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

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

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.

Aziz winked at him slowly and said: “...There are many ways of being a man; mine is to express what is deepest in my heart.

Human relations are impossible. When they are real they are uncomfortable, and when they are comfortable they are unreal. It was for the journey into solitude that the human soul was created.

Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.

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

If there's a God out there, then i would hope he has more important things to attend to than my drinking scotch or eating pork.

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

My conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.

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

It makes a difference doesn't it, whether we fully fence ourselves in, or whether we are fenced out by the barriers of others?

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

Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!

I cannot help thinking that there is something to admire in everyone, even if you do not approve of them.

...the true spirit of gastronomic joylessness. Porridge fills the Englishman up, and prunes clear him out.

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

Love is always being given where it is not required.

One's favorite book is as elusive as one's favorite pudding.

In the creative state a man is taken out of himself.

There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.

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

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

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

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

Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.

Reverence is fatal to literature.