Famous Quotes by Edward M. Forster (42 Quotations)

Lord I disbelieve — help thou my unbelief.

Edward M. Forster – [Skepticism]

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

Edward M. Forster – [Books and Reading]

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.

Edward M. Forster – [Communication]

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.

Edward M. Forster – [Materialism]

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.

Edward M. Forster – [Colleges and Universities]

Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return.

Edward M. Forster – [Trains]

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

Edward M. Forster – [Education]

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.

Edward M. Forster – [Fiction]

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.

Edward M. Forster – [History and Historians]

The idea that nations should love one another, or that business concerns or marketing boards should love one another, or that a man in Portugal should love a man in Peru of whom he has never heard –it is absurd, unreal, dangerous. The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much.

Edward M. Forster – [Love]

The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.

Edward M. Forster – [Organization]

The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly silent.

Edward M. Forster – [Careers]

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.

Edward M. Forster – [Books and Reading]

There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.

Edward M. Forster – [Creeds]

Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.

Edward M. Forster – [Caution]

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.

Edward M. Forster – [Tolerance]

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

Edward M. Forster – [Cities and City Life]

Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.

Edward M. Forster – [Democracy]

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

Edward M. Forster – [Memory]

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

Edward M. Forster – [Vulgarity]