Top 500 E. M. Forster Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “English literature is a flying fish.”

— E. M. Forster

Featured in: Crazy Quotes

2. “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”

— E. M. Forster

3. “One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.”

— E. M. Forster

Featured in: Football Quotes

4. “Only connect!”

— E. M. Forster

5. “Live in fragments no longer. Only connect...”

— E. M. Forster

6. “Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.”

— E. M. Forster

7. “The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.”

— E. M. Forster

8. “Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer.”

— E. M. Forster

9. “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

Featured in: Courage Quotes, Short Quotes About Life

11. “You confuse what’s important with what’s impressive.”

— E. M. Forster

12. “We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won’t do harm – yes, choose a place where you won’t do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

14. “The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.”

— E. M. Forster

15. “Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.”

— E. M. Forster

16. “When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.”

— E. M. Forster

17. “Excuse my mistakes, realize my limitations. Life is not easy as we know it on the earth.”

— E. M. Forster

18. “What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.”

— E. M. Forster

Featured in: Reading Quotes

19. “By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes – a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.”

— E. M. Forster

20. “I think you’re beautiful, the only beautiful person I’ve ever seen. I love your voice and everything to do with you, down to your clothes or the room you are sitting in. I adore you.”

— E. M. Forster

21. “They had nothing in common but the English language.”

— E. M. Forster

22. “So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.”

— E. M. Forster

23. “Lord I disbelieve – help thou my unbelief.”

— E. M. Forster

24. “Nonsense and beauty have close connections.”

— E. M. Forster

25. “They had nothing in common but the English language, and tried by its help to express what neither of them understood.”

— E. M. Forster

26. “It isn’t possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”

— E. M. Forster

27. “Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.”

— E. M. Forster

28. “I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.”

— E. M. Forster

29. “He doesn’t want you to be real, and to think and to live. He doesn’t love you. But I love you. I want you to have your own thoughts and ideas and feelings, even when I hold you in my arms.”

— E. M. Forster

Featured in: Real Quotes

30. “Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

32. “Unless we remember we cannot understand.”

— E. M. Forster

33. “Failure or success seems to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is the wriggle.”

— E. M. Forster

34. “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.”

— E. M. Forster

35. “Truth is a flower in whose neighbourhood others must wither.”

— E. M. Forster

36. “One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.”

— E. M. Forster

37. “Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership.”

— E. M. Forster

38. “Tolerance is just a makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends.”

— E. M. Forster

39. “Life is like a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the intrument as you go along.”

— E. M. Forster

40. “You want to love everyone equally, and that’s worse than impossible – it’s wrong.”

— E. M. Forster

41. “Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.”

— E. M. Forster

42. “While her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to tea.”

— E. M. Forster

43. “A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.”

— E. M. Forster

44. “History develops, art stands still.”

— E. M. Forster

45. “Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.”

— E. M. Forster

Featured in: Book Quotes

46. “What the world most needs today are negative virtues – not minding people, not being huffy, touchy, irritable or revengeful.”

— E. M. Forster

47. “I seem fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or moving it – and I’m sure I can’t tell you whether the fate’s good or evil. I don’t die – I don’t fall in love. And if other people die or fall in love they always do it when I’m just not there.”

— E. M. Forster

48. “Do you remember Italy?”

— E. M. Forster

49. “To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.”

— E. M. Forster

50. “Naked I came into the world, naked I shall go out of it! And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its colour.”

— E. M. Forster