E. M. Forster

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.

Love is always being given where it is not required.

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.

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.

Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.

Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.

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.

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.

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.

The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.

The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.

What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?