E. M. Forster Quotes, Sayings, Remarks, Thoughts and Speeches



E. M. Forster Quotes and Sayings


  • 1
    A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 2
    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. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 3
    At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 4
    At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 5
    Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 6
    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. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 7
    Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 8
    But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 9
    Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 10
    Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 11
    Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 12
    Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 13
    England has always been disinclined to accept human nature. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 14
    Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 15
    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. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 16
    History develops, art stands still. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 17
    How can I know what I think till I see what I say? E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 18
    I am certainly an ought and not a must. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 19
    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. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 20
    I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 21
    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. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 22
    I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 23
    I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 24
    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. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 25
    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. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 26
    I'm a holy man minus the holiness. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 27
    Ideas are fatal to caste. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 28
    If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 29
    If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 30
    It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 31
    It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 32
    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. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 33
    Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 34
    Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 35
    Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish! E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 36
    Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 37
    Love is always being given where it is not required. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 38
    Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 39
    No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 40
    No one is India. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 41
    Nonsense and beauty have close connections. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 42
    One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 43
    One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 44
    One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 45
    One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 46
    One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 47
    Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 48
    Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 49
    Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 50
    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. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 51
    Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 52
    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. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 53
    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. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 54
    Reverence is fatal to literature. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 55
    So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 56
    Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 57
    Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 58
    The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 59
    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. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 60
    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. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 61
    The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 62
    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. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 63
    The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 64
    The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 65
    The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 66
    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. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 67
    The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 68
    The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 69
    The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 70
    The woman who can't influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 71
    The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 72
    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. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 73
    There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 74
    There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 75
    Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 76
    Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 77
    To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 78
    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. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 79
    Two cheers for Democracy; one because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 80
    Unless we remember we cannot understand. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 81
    Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 82
    We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 83
    We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 84
    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. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 85
    We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 86
    We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 87
    What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives? E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 88
    What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF
  • 89
    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. E. M. Forster | Refcard PDF

 

  

  

 

  

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