E. M. Forster

The woman who can't influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.

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.

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.

I am so used to seeing the sort of play which deals with one man and two women. They do not leave me with the feeling I have made a full theatrical meal they do not give me the experience of the multiplicity of life.

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

I never could get on with representative individuals but people who existed on their own account and with whom it might therefore be possible to be friends.

At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes.

Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.

Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return.

The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.

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

Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.

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

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.

We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.

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

Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.

At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.

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

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.

Reverence is fatal to literature.

The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.

For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.

The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance.

No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.

England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.

Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.

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.

Two cheers for Democracy; one because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism.

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

I am certainly an ought and not a must.

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.

No one is India.

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.

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

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.

There is much good luck in the world, but it is luck. We are none of us safe. We are children, playing or quarrelling on the line.

Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!

Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due - she reminds us too much of a prima donna.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.

Tolerance is a very dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is negative. It merely means putting up with people, being able to stand things.

I'm a holy man minus the holiness.

The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.

One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.

How can I know what I think till I see what I say?