Quotes By E. M. Forster

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.

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.

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.

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.

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.

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

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

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

I'm a holy man minus the holiness.

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

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.

Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.

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

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.

Reverence is fatal to literature.

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.

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.

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.

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