Aging & Wisdom Quote by E. M. Forster

Oxford is imagined here as less a university than a jealous personality: a place that doesn’t just educate you, it courts you. Forster’s jab at Cambridge as a “mere receptacle for youth” is deliberately ungenerous, a provocation dressed up as connoisseurship. “Receptacle” makes Cambridge sound utilitarian, almost maternal in the blandest sense: somewhere young people are deposited, processed, and sent on. Oxford, by contrast, is “Oxford” twice over - self-identical, self-mythologizing, a brand before branding.

The real sting is in “inmates.” That single word turns collegiate life from pastoral idyll into soft captivity. You don’t simply attend Oxford; you’re held by it. The subtext is Forster’s suspicion of institutions that convert human energy into loyalty to the institution itself. His “perhaps” is doing moral laundering, pretending to muse while landing an accusation: Oxford prefers devotion upward (to tradition, buildings, rituals, prestige) over devotion sideways (to peers, intimacy, solidarity).

Read in Forster’s cultural moment - early 20th-century England, class codes hardened into architecture - the line becomes a critique of how elite settings manage desire and attachment. If students “love it,” the place wins twice: it keeps its hierarchy intact and recruits its graduates as lifelong partisans. If they “love one another,” bonds form that can ignore or outgrow the institution. Forster, whose fiction is obsessed with the cost of repression and the politics of intimacy, recognizes the trick: Oxford’s greatest curriculum is itself.