E. M. Forster Era Quotations

Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.

Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.

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

Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!

The woman who can't influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself.

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

I am certainly an ought and not a must.

Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.

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.

Ideas are fatal to caste.

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

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

England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.

My law-givers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul.

We may divide characters into flat and round.

Love is always being given where it is not required.

English literature is a flying fish.

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

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

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

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.

A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man.

I don't think literature will be purged until its philosophic pretentiousness is extruded, and I shant live to see that purge, nor perhaps when it has happened will anything survive.

It is now only in letters I write what I feel: not in literature any more, and I seldom say it, because I keep trying to be amusing.

The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them.

Reverence is fatal to literature.

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

Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.

Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's.

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

I'm a holy man minus the holiness.

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

History develops, art stands still.

Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.

Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.

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

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

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.

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

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.