Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
E. M. Forster

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

One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions.
E. M. Forster

One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.
E. M. Forster

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

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

Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.
E. M. Forster

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
E. M. Forster

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

Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.
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

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.
E. M. Forster

Reverence is fatal to literature.
E. M. Forster

So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.
E. M. Forster

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

Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.
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

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