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
The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art. – 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
Two cheers for Democracy; one because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism. – 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
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
Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy. – E. M. Forster
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man. – E. M. Forster
What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives? – E. M. Forster
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. – E. M. Forster
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote. – E. M. Forster
At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity. – 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
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
