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E.M. Forster Quotes
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Edward Morgan Forster , known as E. M. Forster, was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. Many of his novels examined class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society, notably A Room with a View , Howards End , and A Passage to India , which brought him his greatest success. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 16 different years.

✵ 1. January 1879 – 7. June 1970  •  Other names Е. М. Форстер
E.M. Forster photo
E.M. Forster: 200 quotes40 likes

E.M. Forster Quotes

“Love felt and returned, love which our bodies exact and our hearts have transfigured, love which is the most real thing that we shall ever meet, reappeared now as the world's enemy, and she must stifle it.”

E.M. Forster book A Room with a View

Source: A Room with a View

“We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.”

E.M. Forster

“The Valkyries are symbols not only of courage but of intelligence; they represent the human spirit snatching its opportunity while the going is good, and one of them even finds time to love. Bruennhilde's last song hymns the recurrence of love, and since it is the privilege of art to exaggerate she goes even further, and proclaims the love which is eternally triumphant, and feeds upon freedom and lives.”

E.M. Forster

What I Believe (1938)

“Why can't we be friends now?' said the other, holding him affectionately. 'It's what I want. It's what you want.' But the horses didn't want it — they swerved apart: the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temple, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they emerged from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices 'No, not yet,' and the sky said 'No, not there.”

E.M. Forster book A Passage to India

Source: A Passage to India (1924), Ch. 37

“I grudged her nothing except my company. But it has gone further, like the degradation of rural England: this afternoon (Sunday in April) all the young men had women with them in far-flung cameradeie. If women ever wanted to be by themselves all would be well. But I don't believe they ever want to be, except for reasons of advertisement, and their instinct is never to let men be by themselves. This, I begin to see, is sex-war, and D. H. L. has seen it, in spite of a durable marriage, and is far more on the facts than Bernard Shaw and his Life Force.”

E.M. Forster

Source: Commonplace Book (1985), p. 59

“My difficulty with working class writers is that they don't make the working class come alive—Leslie Halward is an exception, but as you imply he is not very important. They give me information and they give their comrades gratification, but that's all; gloom, indignation, aspiration in plenty, and plenty of stains on the tablecloth and coal-dust in the mine—but no living beings to experience them.”

E.M. Forster

Letter 350, to John Lehmann, 21 December 1940
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

“But that was only the beginning of her mortification. Harold had proved her wrong. He had seen that she was a shifty, shallow hypocrite. She had not dared to be alone with him since her exposure. She had never looked at him and had hardly spoken. He seemed cheerful, but what was he thinking? He would never forgive her.”

E.M. Forster

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

“There is fascism, leading only into the blackness which it has chosen as its symbol, into smartness and yapping out of orders, and self-righteous brutality, into social as well as international war. It means change without hope. Our immediate duty — in that tinkering which is the only useful form of action in our leaky old tub — our immediate duty is to stop it.”

E.M. Forster

"Notes on the Way", Time and Tide Magazine (10 June 1934); reprinted in The Prince's Tale and Other Uncollected Writings (1998)

“I enjoy French poetry as well as French prose, and I believe that this land must have some cultural connection with the European continent, and that she is best connected through her spiritual complement across the Straits of Dover.”

E.M. Forster

"Some Books: A New Year's Resolution for 1944" (1943), reprinted in Jeffrey M. Heath, (ed.) The Creator as Critic and Other Writings by E.M. Forster, Dundurn, 2008.

“Self-pity? I see no moral objections to it, the smell drives people away, but that's a practical objection, and occasionally an advantage.”

E.M. Forster

Source: Commonplace Book (1985), p. 50

“Laughing at mankind is rather weary rot, I think. We shall never meet with anyone nicer. Nature, whom I used to be keen on, is too unfair. She evokes plenty of high & exhausting feelings, and offers nothing in return.”

E.M. Forster

Letter 57, to Arthur Cole, 7 July 1905
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

“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 Book That Influenced Me"
Two Cheers for Democracy (1951)

“She began to speak, but waited a moment for the maid to clear away the tea. In the waning light her room seemed gentle and grey, and there hung about it an odour (I do not write ‘the odour’) of Roman Catholicism, which is assuredly among the gracious things of the world. It was the room of a woman who had found time to be good to herself as well as to others; who had brought forth fruit, spiritual and temporal; who had borne a mysterious tragedy not only with patience but actually with joy.”

E.M. Forster

The rock
The Life to Come and other stories (1972)

“[…] 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.”

E.M. Forster

Source: Commonplace Book (1985), p. 92 (26-2-32)

““There are moments when I feel Howards End peculiarly our own." "All the same, London's creeping." She pointed over the meadow--over eight or nine meadows, but at the end of them was a red rust. "You see that in Surrey and even Hampshire now," she continued. "I can see it from the Purbeck Downs. And London is only part of something else, I'm afraid. Life's going to be melted down, all over the world." Margaret knew that her sister spoke truly. Howards End, Oniton, the Purbeck Downs, the Oderberge, were all survivals, and the melting-pot was being prepared for them. Logically, they had no right to be alive. One's hope was in the weakness of logic. Were they possibly the earth beating time?”

E.M. Forster book Howards End

Source: Howards End (1910), Ch. 44

“Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.”

E.M. Forster

"Tolerance"
Two Cheers for Democracy (1951)

“No disease of the imagination is so difficult to cure, as that which is complicated with the dread of guilt: fancy and conscience then act interchangeably upon us, and so often shift their places, that the illusions of one are not distinguished from the dictates of the other.”

E.M. Forster

Source: Commonplace Book (1985), p. 76

“As for my politics, you will have guessed that I am not a Fascist — Fascism does evil that evil may come. And I am not a Communist, though perhaps I might be one if I was a younger and braver man, for in Communism I see hope. It does many things which I think evil, but I know that it intends good. 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. I do care about the past. I do care about the preservation and extension of freedom.”

E.M. Forster

"Liberty In England", Speech (June 21, 1935), reprinted in Abinger Harvest (1936).

“A wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and — by some sad, strange irony — it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.”

E.M. Forster book Where Angels Fear to Tread

Source: Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), Ch. 7

“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

What I Believe (1938)

“It is better to have a home of one’s own than to always be a typist. Hilda did not talk quite as she should, and her husband had not scrupled to correct her. She had never forgotten – it was such a small thing, yet she could not forget it – she had never forgotten that night on their honeymoon when she had said something ungrammatical about the relative position of their limbs.”

E.M. Forster

The Obelisk
The Life to Come and other stories (1972)

“I have very strongly of late the wish that others may be as sensitive as myself and the fear that they will not be. Colleague Sir Frank Adcock stumped by the sunset-portent unheeding. And I can't arge that I gain, or that others would gain, anything for humanity by observing and recording what went on for a few moments in the sky on Boar Race evening. I sometimes pretend to myself that I am public-spirited. I am not. I am an hedonist who wants pleasant sensations. On the other hand I am not the usual type of hedonist, for I want sensations to be had”

E.M. Forster

if not by myself, then by someone else. The show shouldn't end with my death, which becomes a minor boo-hoo.

p. 211 (1959)
Commonplace Book (1985)

“Masood, a young lady has fallen in love with me—at least so I judge from her letters. Awkward is it not—awkward and surprising. You would be flattered and twirl your moustache, but I am merely uncomfortable. I wish she would stop, as she is very nice, and I enjoyed being friends. What an ill constructed world this is! Love is always being given where it is not required.”

E.M. Forster

Letter 137, to Syed Ross Masood, 5 December 1914
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

“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.”

E.M. Forster

Source: Commonplace Book (1985), p. 46

“But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist's readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters.”

E.M. Forster

Source: Commonplace Book (1985), p. 151

“Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.”

E.M. Forster book Howards End

Ch. 19 http://books.google.com/books?id=G7xfuc7lWvMC&amp;q=%22Personal+relations+are+the+important+thing+for+ever+and+ever+and+not+this+outer+life+of+telegrams+and+anger%22&amp;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)

“I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper.”

E.M. Forster

What I Believe (1938)

“N. B. this book and pensées not important and the temptation to mistake them for Creation must be resisted.”

E.M. Forster

Source: Commonplace Book (1985), p. 155 (1943)

“All this fame and money, which have so thrilled me when they came to others, leave me cold when they come to me. I am not an ascetic, but I don't know what to do with them, and my daily life has never been so trying, and there is no one to fill it emotionally.”

E.M. Forster

Letter 251, to Florence Barger, 23 December 1924
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

“Today 29-9-34 ion the garden, rockery side, looking up to the house where Bone was working, sky bluish, very gentle, I looked without theories or self consciousness. This happens very seldom, though I can prolong the delight if I prevent my engines from restarting.”

E.M. Forster

Source: Commonplace Book (1985), p. 95

“Science, when applied to personal relationships, is always just wrong.”

E.M. Forster

Letter 231, to W. J. H. Sprott, 28 June 1923
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

“The story of the Fall always fascinates me as a play ground, but I cannot find any profound meaning in it, because of my 'liberal' view of human nature: I cannot believe in a state of original innocence, still less in a profound meaning in it, and I am always minimising the conception and the extent of Sin and the sinfulness of sex.”

E.M. Forster

Letter 396, to Eric Fletcher, 9 July 1951
Selected Letters (1983-1985)

“Had she only realized that it is only hypocrites who cannot forgive hypocrisy, whereas those who search for truth are too conscious of the maze to be hard on others – than the bitter flow of her thoughts might have been stopped and the catastrophe averted. But it was not conceivable to her that he should forgive – or that she should accept forgiveness, for to her forgiveness meant a triumph of one person over another.”

E.M. Forster

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

“The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink; the nations of today behave to each other worse than they ever did in the past, they cheat, rob, bully and bluff, make war without notice, and kill as many women and children as possible; whereas primitive tribes were at all events restrained by taboos.”

E.M. Forster

What I Believe (1938)

“Peacefulness to be found in writing. Why do I not write every day? Partly because I feel I ought to write well and know I can't. But that is not a good enough reason for not writing, if it gains me poise & peace.”

E.M. Forster

Source: Commonplace Book (1985), p. 219 (1960)

“All invitations must proceed from heaven perhaps; perhaps it is futile for men to initiate their own unity, they do but widen the gulfs between them by the attempt.”

E.M. Forster book A Passage to India

Source: A Passage to India (1924), Ch. 4

“I know very well how limited and how open to criticism, English freedom is. It is race-bound and it's class-bound. It means freedom for the Englishman, but not for the subject-races of his Empire. If you invite the average Englishman to share his liberties with the inhabitants of India or Kenya, he will reply, "Never," if he is a Tory, and "Not until I consider them worthy" if he is a Liberal.”

E.M. Forster

"Liberty In England", Speech (June 21, 1935), reprinted in Abinger Harvest (1936).