Quotes from E. M. Forster

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

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

Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.

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

No one is more triumphant than the man who chooses a worthy subject and masters all its facts.

Man can learn everything if he will but try.

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.

I'm a holy man minus the holiness. Hand that on to your three spies, and tell them to put it in their pipes.

Towns are after all excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.

Man has to pick up the use of his functions as he goes along- especially the function of Love.

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

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected.

I do like Christmas on the whole.... In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year.

Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form.

England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature--for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk.

The sort of poetry I seek only resides in objects Man can't touch - like England 's grass network of lanes 100 years ago, but today he can destroy them and only Lord Farrer keeps him from doing it.

What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?

The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.

Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?

Hope, politeness, the blowing of a nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce "boum.

In the creative state a man is taken out of himself.

It is fate that I am here,' George persisted, 'but you can call it Italy if it makes you less unhappy.

Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer.

It is so difficult - at least, I find it difficult - to understand people who speak the truth.