690 Quotes by E. M. Forster

An efficiency-regime cannot be run without a few heroes stuck about it to carry off the dullness -- much as plums have to be put into bad pudding to make it palatable.

Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.

In the creative state a man is taken out of himself.

Only connect!...Only connect the prose and the passion.

Ideas are fatal to caste.

Truth is a flower in whose neighbourhood others must wither.

Chess is a forcing house where the fruits of character can ripen more fully than in life

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all... My lawgivers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul. My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in the Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is 'Lord, I disbelieve - help thou my unbelief.

Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.