E.M. Forster Quotes (200 quotes, page 3)

"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

People

“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)

Feeling , Nature , Thinking

“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)

Men , Art , Way , Feeling

“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)

World , Light , Time , Waiting

“[…] 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)

Feeling , Literature

““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

Life , World , Hope , Feeling

“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)

Love , Life

“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

Disease , Imagination

“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).

Age , Hope , Communication , Support

“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

Love , Life , Children , Sadness

“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)

Suffering

“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)

Home , Night , Forgetting

“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)

Death , Fear

“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)

Love , World

“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

Literature , Thinking

“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

World , Learning , Fight

“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&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
Howards End (1910)

Life , Personality , Anger

“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)

Love , Life , Sense , Happiness

“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

Stupidity , Education , Learning

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

E.M. Forster

Source: Commonplace Book (1985), p. 6