“Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think is creation's.”

— E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951, The Raison d'Etre of Criticism in the Arts

About E. M. Forster

1879 – 1970

English novelist, author of "A Room with a View" and "A Passage to India".

“Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.”

“Happiness in the ordinary sense is not what one needs in life, though one is right to aim at it.”

“Poetry is a spirit; and they that would worship it must worship in spirit and in truth.”

“Any one thing in the creation is sufficient to demonstrate a Providence to an humble and grateful mind.”

“If music be the food of love, play on.”

“Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.”

“If eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being.”

“The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness.”

“Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.”