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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
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Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.
E. M. Forster
It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.
E. M. Forster
There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.
E. M. Forster
Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.
E. M. Forster
I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.
E. M. Forster
The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.
E. M. Forster
If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.
E. M. Forster
The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
E. M. Forster
Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.
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
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
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.
E. M. Forster
Ideas are fatal to caste.
E. M. Forster
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.
E. M. Forster
Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
E. M. Forster
History develops, art stands still.
E. M. Forster
I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper.
E. M. Forster
Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.
E. M. Forster
Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.
E. M. Forster
The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.
E. M. Forster
I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
E. M. Forster
No one is India.
E. M. Forster
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.
E. M. Forster
Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
E. M. Forster
But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else.
E. M. Forster
So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.
E. M. Forster
I'm a holy man minus the holiness.
E. M. Forster
Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's.
E. M. Forster
The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.
E. M. Forster
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.
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
Unless we remember we cannot understand.
E. M. Forster
Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.
E. M. Forster
We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.
E. M. Forster
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.
E. M. Forster
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
E. M. Forster
Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.
E. M. Forster
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.
E. M. Forster
At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
E. M. Forster
Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.
E. M. Forster
If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
E. M. Forster
Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
E. M. Forster
The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.
E. M. Forster
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.
E. M. Forster
Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.
E. M. Forster
Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
E. M. Forster
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.
E. M. Forster
The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.
E. M. Forster