E. M. Forster
E. M. Forster
Edward Morgan Forster OM CHwas an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. Forster's humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect ... ". His 1908 novel, A Room with a View, is his most optimistic work, while A Passage to Indiabrought him his greatest success. He was...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth1 January 1879
E. M. Forster quotes about
Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.
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.
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.
The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power.
What the world most needs today are negative virtues - not minding people, not being huffy, touchy, irritable or revengeful.
But why I cry out against Rubens is because he painted undressed people instead of naked ones.
I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.
Life's very difficult and full of surprises. At all events, I've got as far as that. To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged--well, one can't do all these things at once, worse luck, because they're so contradictory. It's then that proportion comes in--to live by proportion. Don't begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed...
I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.
But it struck him that people are not really dead until they are felt to be dead. As long as there is some misunderstanding about them, they possess a sort of immortality.
It's not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.
It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted.
To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.
I'd far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.