“Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.” Edward Morgan Forster
“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.” Edward Morgan Forster
“Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.” Edward Morgan Forster EasyLifeWisdomPracticeChronicleBewildering
“One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.” Edward Morgan 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.” Edward Morgan 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.” Edward Morgan Forster
“Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.” Edward Morgan 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.” Edward Morgan Forster
“The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.” Edward Morgan Forster
“There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.” Edward Morgan Forster
“Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.” Edward Morgan Forster
“We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.” Edward Morgan 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.” Edward Morgan 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.” Edward Morgan 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.” Edward Morgan 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.” Edward Morgan 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.” Edward Morgan 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.” Edward Morgan Forster
