E. M. Forster – 32 Quotes

32 Quotes by E. M. Forster

History develops, art stands still.

– E. M. Forster

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

– E. M. Forster

Love is always being given where it is not required.

– E. M. Forster

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

– E. M. Forster

Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.

– E. M. Forster

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

– E. M. Forster

England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.

– E. M. Forster

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

– E. M. Forster

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

– E. M. Forster

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

– E. M. Forster

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.

– E. M. Forster

The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.

– E. M. Forster

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

– E. M. Forster

The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.

– E. M. Forster

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

– E. M. Forster

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

– E. M. Forster

Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.

– E. M. Forster

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

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

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

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

– E. M. Forster

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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