Quotes By E. M. Forster

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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

Ideas are fatal to caste.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.