Quotes By E. M. Forster

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

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.

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

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

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

I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.

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.

So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.

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.

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.

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.

I'm a holy man minus the holiness.

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.

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.

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.