Ch. 19 http://books.google.com/books?id=G7xfuc7lWvMC&q=%22Personal+relations+are+the+important+thing+for+ever+and+ever+and+not+this+outer+life+of+telegrams+and+anger%22&pg=PA199#v=onepage <br class="br">Howards End (1910)

“Happiness in the ordinary sense is not what one needs in life, though one is right to aim at it. The true satisfaction is to come through and see those whom one loves come through.”

E.M. Forster

Letter 216, to Florence Barger, 11 February 1922
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

“As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take the examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one be a penny the stupider.”

E.M. Forster book Aspects of the Novel

Source: Aspects of the Novel (1927), Chapter One: Introductory

“Axiom: Novel must have either one living character or a perfect pattern: fails otherwise.”

E.M. Forster

Source: Commonplace Book (1985), p. 6

“[Tolerance] is just a makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends.”

E.M. Forster

"Tolerance"
Two Cheers for Democracy (1951)

“I wrote it [Maurice] neither for my friends or the public—but because it was weighing on me; and my previous training made me write it as literature, though for a long time I meant to show it no one at all. […] I am much dependant on criticism and now, backed by you and some others, do feel that I have created something absolutely new, even to the Greeks. Whitman nearly anticipated me but he didn't really know what he was after, or only half knew—shirked, even to himself, the statement.”

E.M. Forster

Letter 144, to Edward Joseph Dent, 6 March 1915
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

“What puzzles me most is your criticism that he showed 'no sense of engagement'. I haven't met the expression before, and feel bound to comment on its totalitarian tang. Engagement not with the truth as the speaker apprehends it, but with the alleged opinion of the majority of listeners.”

E.M. Forster

Letter 400, to John Morris, 12 January 1953
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

“Always fatuity, vulgarity, as soon as human passion is touched. […] Just as some poetry is of the eye (form, colour) and some of the ear, so Keats is of the palate. Not only has he constant reference to its pleasures, but the general sensation after reading him is one of tasting. 'What's the harm?' Well, taste for some reason or the other can't carry one far into the world of beauty—that reason being perhaps that though you don't want comradership there you do want the possibility of comradership, and A cannot swallow B's mouthful by any possibility:…. and this exclusiveness (to maunder on) also attaches to the physical side of sex though not the least to the spiritual.”

E.M. Forster

Letter 162, to Malcolm Darling, 1 December 1916
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

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

E.M. Forster

"The Raison d'Etre of Criticism in the Arts"
Two Cheers for Democracy (1951)

“I went to our Theological College lately, Westcott House, and we had a sort of chat. He told me that without him it was impossible to understand the universe, and I came away having forgotten to reply that it did not occur to me to try to understand the universe. I must not run on like this so. Or rather what I mean is I have just finished the biography of my great aunt. Understanding, or partially understanding, her has been quite a large enough job.”

E.M. Forster

Letter 411, to Lionel Trilling, 1 August 1955
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

“If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious.”

E.M. Forster book Aspects of the Novel

Source: Aspects of the Novel (1927), Chapter Three: People

“Why are pictures like this allowed?’ he suddenly cried. He had stopped in front of a colonial print in which the martyrdom of St Agatha was depicted with all the fervour that incompetence could command.
‘It’s only a saint,’ said Lady Peaslake, placidly raising her head.
‘How disgusting – and how ugly’
‘Yes, very. It’s Roman Catholic.”

E.M. Forster

Albergo Empedocle
The Life to Come and other stories (1972)

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

E.M. Forster

"Anonymity: An Enquiry"
Two Cheers for Democracy (1951)