E. M. Forster Quotes

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.

E. M. Forster 



America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for. It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large.
E. M. Forster 


Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.
E. M. Forster 


Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.
E. M. Forster 


Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
E. M. Forster  


England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.
E. M. Forster 


I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.
E. M. Forster 


I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I'd like to be.
E. M. Forster 


Ideas are fatal to caste.
E. M. Forster 


If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.
E. M. Forster  


It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.
E. M. Forster 


It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.
E. M. Forster 


Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.
E. M. Forster 


Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.
E. M. Forster 


No one is India.
E. M. Forster 


One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions.
E. M. Forster 


One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.
E. M. Forster  


Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.
E. M. Forster 


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


People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.
E. M. Forster 


Reverence is fatal to literature.
E. M. Forster 


Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.
E. M. Forster 



The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.
E. M. Forster 



The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.
E. M. Forster  



The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.
E. M. Forster