E. M. Forster Quotes

One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.

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.

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

English literature is a flying fish.

It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.

But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else.

Self-pity? I see no moral objections to it, the smell drives people away, but that’s a practical objection, and occasionally an advantage.

I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.

There is fascism, leading only into the blackness which it has chosen as its symbol, into smartness and yapping out of orders, and self-righteous brutality, into social as well as international war. It means change without hope. Our immediate duty – in that tinkering which is the only useful form of action in our leaky old tub – our immediate duty is to stop it.

Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership.

Science, when applied to personal relationships, is always just wrong .

Life – No, I’ve nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.