E. M. Forster quotes

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)
The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.
E. M. Forster
Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.
E. M. Forster
Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
E. M. Forster
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
The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.
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
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
E. M. Forster
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
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
How can I know what I think till I see what I say? (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
Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's.
E. M. Forster
Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
E. M. Forster
The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
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
The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.
E. M. Forster
She must be assured that it is not a criminal offense to love at first sight.
E. M. Forster
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
One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
E. M. Forster
Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time. (E. M. Forster)
There's enough sorrow in the world, isn't there, without trying to invent it.
E. M. Forster
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
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
An efficiency-regime cannot be run without a few heroes stuck about it to carry off the dullness - much as plums have to be put into bad pudding to make it palatable.
E. M. Forster