Quotes By E. M. Forster

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

History develops, art stands still.

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.

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

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.

I never could get on with representative individuals but people who existed on their own account and with whom it might therefore be possible to be friends.

Love is always being given where it is not required.

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

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

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

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.

Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

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.

At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes.

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

If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.

The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.

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

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

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

Two cheers for Democracy; one because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism.

Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.