Daily Inspiration Quote by E. M. Forster

Forster’s line is a polite grenade tossed into the drawing room where art is forever being recruited as a foot soldier. In an era when writers were increasingly pressed into service by ideologies, parties, and reform movements, he insists on an inconvenient hierarchy: the artist outranks the banner they’re asked to carry. It’s a statement that flatters “creative writers,” yes, but more pointedly it mistrusts causes as narrowing machines. Causes demand clarity, discipline, and loyalty; fiction thrives on ambiguity, contradiction, and the embarrassing reality that people rarely behave like arguments.

The intent isn’t to sneer at politics or ethics. It’s to defend the novel’s special power: its ability to complicate moral certainty by rendering human beings in full. Forster, the liberal humanist who famously urged “Only connect,” understood that connection is sabotaged when art becomes messaging. A cause wants converts; a novel wants recognition. The writer who subordinates imagination to doctrine may win applause from comrades and still produce dead pages.

The subtext is also self-protective. Forster lived through two world wars, the rise of totalitarianisms, and intense pressures around sexuality and respectability. His own work and private life were shaped by what couldn’t be openly “represented.” So “greater than the causes” reads as a defense of interior freedom: the writer’s obligation is not to be correct, but to be true to the messy, unrepeatable texture of experience.

There’s irony here too: the quote is itself a kind of cause. It asks us to resist the comforting idea that art’s highest purpose is to be useful.