A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
- E. M. Forster Quote

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 Quote

Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.
- E. M. Forster Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.
- E. M. Forster Quote

Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
- E. M. Forster Quote

Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.
- E. M. Forster Quote

Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.
- E. M. Forster Quote

England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.
- E. M. Forster Quote

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.
- E. M. Forster Quote

History develops, art stands still.
- E. M. Forster Quote

How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
- E. M. Forster Quote

I am certainly an ought and not a must.
- E. M. Forster Quote

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 Quote

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

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 Quote

I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.
- E. M. Forster Quote

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 Quote

I'm a holy man minus the holiness.
- E. M. Forster Quote

Ideas are fatal to caste.
- E. M. Forster Quote

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 Quote

It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.
- E. M. Forster Quote

It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.
- E. M. Forster Quote

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.
- E. M. Forster Quote

Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.
- E. M. Forster Quote

Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!
- E. M. Forster Quote

Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.
- E. M. Forster Quote

Love is always being given where it is not required.
- E. M. Forster Quote

No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.
- E. M. Forster Quote

No one is India.
- E. M. Forster Quote

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
- E. M. Forster Quote

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
- E. M. Forster Quote

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

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 Quote

Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.
- E. M. Forster Quote

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
- E. M. Forster Quote

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 Quote

Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.
- E. M. Forster Quote

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 Quote

Reverence is fatal to literature.
- E. M. Forster Quote

So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.
- E. M. Forster Quote

Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.
- E. M. Forster Quote

The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.
- E. M. Forster Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
- E. M. Forster Quote

The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.
- E. M. Forster Quote

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.
- E. M. Forster Quote

The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.
- E. M. Forster Quote

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

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 Quote

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.
- E. M. Forster Quote

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 Quote

Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's.
- E. M. Forster Quote

Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.
- E. M. Forster Quote

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 Quote

Two cheers for Democracy; one because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism.
- E. M. Forster Quote

Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.
- E. M. Forster Quote

We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.
- E. M. Forster Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote