Quotes from E. M. Forster

A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.

Excuse my mistakes, realize my limitations. Life is not easy as we know it on the earth.

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.

Chess is a forcing house where the fruits of character can ripen more fully than in life

Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.

The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.

Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three.

Love is always being given where it is not required.

The echo began in some indescribable way to undermine her hold on life. Coming at a moment when she chanced to be fatigued, it had managed to murmur, "Pathos, piety, courage—they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value." If one had spoken vileness in that place, or quoted lofty poetry, the [echo's] comment would have been the same—"Ou-boum."

It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why history is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead.

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.

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

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.

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

The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.

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.

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

It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.

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

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.

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.

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.