E. M. Forster Quotes

291 Sourced Quotes

Italy is such a delightful place to live in if you happen to be a man. There one may enjoy that exquisite luxury of Socialism--that true Socialism which is based not on equality of income or character, but on the equality of manners. In the democracy of the caffè or the street the great question of our life has been solved, and the brotherhood of man is a reality. But it is accomplished at the expense of the sisterhood of women.

E. M. Forster
Solidity, caution, integrity, efficiency. Lack of imagination, hypocrisy. These qualities characterize the middle classes in everycountry, but in England they are national characteristics.

E. M. Forster
It is devilish difficult to criticise society & also create human beings.

E. M. Forster
All that is observable in a man-that is to say his actions and such of his spiritual existence as can be deduced from his actions-falls into the domain of history.

E. M. Forster
When that strange race nears the dust and is condemned as untouchable, then nature remembers the physical perfection that she accomplished elsewhere, and throws out a god-not many, but one here and there, to prove to society how little its categories impress her.

E. M. Forster
I hated the idleness, the stupidity, the respectability, the petty unselfishness.

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

E. M. Forster
.. life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t'other from which...

E. M. Forster
A critic has no right to the narrowness which is the frequent prerogative of the creative artist.

E. M. Forster
Growing old is an emotion which comes over us at almost any age; I had it myself between the ages of 25 and 30.

E. M. Forster
In the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life.

E. M. Forster
If only the sense of actuality can be lulled-and it sleeps for ever in most historians-there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.

E. M. Forster
God is not Love in the East. He is Power, although Mercy may temper it.

E. M. Forster
The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power.

E. M. Forster
Not only in sex, but in all things men have moved blindly, have evolved out of slime to dissolve into it when this accident of consequences is over.

E. M. Forster
I'm a holy man minus the holiness. Hand that on to your three spies, and tell them to put it in their pipes.

E. M. Forster
It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.

E. M. Forster
Pity wraps the student of the past in an ambrosial cloud, and washes his limbs with eternal youth.

E. M. Forster
No one is more triumphant than the man who chooses a worthy subject and masters all its facts.

E. M. Forster
It is never possible for a novelist to deny time inside the fabric of his novel: he must cling, however lightly, to the thread of his story, he must touch the interminable tapeworm, otherwise he becomes unintelligible, which, in his case, is a blunder.

E. M. Forster
I am actually what my age and my upbringing have made me--a bourgeois who adheres to the British constitution, adheres to it rather than supports it, and the fact that this isn't dignified doesn't worry me.

E. M. Forster