Top 500 E. M. Forster Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “A chance word or a sigh are just as much evidence as a speech or a murder: the life they reveal ceases to be secret and enters the realm of action.”

— E. M. Forster

452. “Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.”

— E. M. Forster

453. “Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it.”

— E. M. Forster

454. “Madness is not for everyone, but Maurice’s proved the thunderbolt that dispels the clouds. The storm had been working up not for three days as he supposed, but for six years. It had brewed in the insecurities of being where no eye pierces, his surroundings had thickened it. It had burst and he had not died. The brilliancy of day was around him, he stood upon the mountain range that overshadows youth, he saw.”

— E. M. Forster

455. “But they did not chatter much, for the boy, when he liked a person, would as soon sit silent in his company as speak.”

— E. M. Forster

456. “The feudal ownership of land did bring dignity, whereas the modern ownership of movables is reducing us again to a nomadic horde. We are reverting to the civilisation of luggage, and historians of the future will note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root in the earth, and may find in this the secret of their imaginative poverty.”

— E. M. Forster

457. “Lucy’s Sabbath was generally of this amphibious nature. She kept it without hypocrisy in the morning, and broke it without reluctance in the afternoon.”

— E. M. Forster

458. “Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.”

— E. M. Forster

459. “She disliked confidences, for they might lead to self-knowledge and to that king of terrors – Light.”

— E. M. Forster

460. “Without form, the sensitiveness vanishes.”

— E. M. Forster

461. “No one is more triumphant than the man who chooses a worthy subject and masters all its facts.”

— E. M. Forster

462. “The issues Miss Quested had raised were so much more important than she was herself that people inevitably forgot her.”

— E. M. Forster

463. “No doubt his wife and children were beautiful too, for people usually get what they already possess.”

— E. M. Forster

464. “At Oxford he learned that the importance of human beings has been vastly over rated by specialists.”

— E. M. Forster

465. “How wide the gulf between Henry as he was and Henry as Helen thought he ought to be! And she herself – hovering as usual between the two, now accepting men as they are, now yearning with her sister for Truth. Love and Truth – their warfare seems eternal. Perhaps the whole visible world rests on it, and if they were one, life itself, like the spirits when Prospero was reconciled to his brother, might vanish into air, into thin air.”

— E. M. Forster

466. “I have myself to face a world which is tragic without becoming tragic myself.”

— E. M. Forster

467. “If you leave the line, you leave a gap in the line.”

— E. M. Forster

468. “I’m always right. I’m quite uneasy at being always right so often.”

— E. M. Forster

469. “Appearing thus late in the story, Cecil must be at once described. He was medieval. Like a Gothic statue.”

— E. M. Forster

470. “Let us discuss why poetry has lost the power of making men brave.”

— E. M. Forster

471. “Rudeness affected Margaret like a bitter taste in the mouth. It poisoned life. At times it is necessary, but woe to those who employ it without due need.”

— E. M. Forster

472. “It was the hour of unreality.”

— E. M. Forster

473. “O for the night that was ending, for the sleep and the wakefulness, the toughness and tenderness mixed, the sweet temper, the safety in darkness. Would such a night ever return?”

— E. M. Forster

474. “No English novelist is as great as Tolstoy –that is to say, has given so complete a picture of man’s life, both on its domestic and heroic side. No English novelist has explored man’s soul as deeply as Dostoyevsky. And no novelist anywhere has analysed the modern consciousness as successfully as Marcel Proust.”

— E. M. Forster

475. “One was tired of everything, it seemed. One launched into enthusiasms only to collapse gracefully, and pick oneself up amid sympathetic laughter.”

— E. M. Forster

476. “It was the hour of unreality – the hour, that is, when unfamiliar things are real.”

— E. M. Forster

477. “He supposed her ‘as clever as they make ‘em’, but no more, not realizing that she was penetrating to the depths of his soul, and approving of what she found there.”

— E. M. Forster

478. “Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.”

— E. M. Forster

479. “He had said it bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things.”

— E. M. Forster

480. “But why I cry out against Rubens is because he painted undressed people instead of naked ones.”

— E. M. Forster

481. “The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom.”

— E. M. Forster

482. “People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.”

— E. M. Forster

483. “But this is something new!′ said Mrs. Munt, who collected new ideas as a squirrel collects nuts, and was especially attracted by those that are portable.”

— E. M. Forster

484. “Every man has somewhere about him some belief for which he’d die. Only isn’t it improbable that your parents and guardians told it to you? If there is one won’t it be part of your own flesh and spirit?”

— E. M. Forster

485. “With his head on the fender and all his limbs relaxed, he felt almost as safe as he felt once when his mother killed a ghost in the passage by carrying him through it in her arms. There was no ghost now; he was frightened at reality; he was frightened at the splendors and horrors of the world.”

— E. M. Forster

486. “If you introduce the human figure you at once arouse either disgust or desire.”

— E. M. Forster

487. “He mourned his wife more sincerely because he mourned her seldom.”

— E. M. Forster

488. “Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.”

— E. M. Forster

489. “Some reviews give pain. This is regrettable, but no author has the right to whine. He was not obliged to be an author. He invited publicity, and he must take the publicity that comes along.”

— E. M. Forster

490. “They chose to regard it as a miraculous preservation.”

— E. M. Forster

491. “He was interested in the sudden friendship between two women so apparently dissimilar as Miss Bartlett and Miss Lavish. They were always in each other’s company, with Lucy a slighted third. Miss Lavish he believed he understood, but Miss Bartlett might reveal unknown depths of strangeness, though not, perhaps, of meaning.”

— E. M. Forster

492. “He is rather a peculiar man.” Again he hesitated, and then said gently: “I think he would not take advantage of your acceptance, nor expect you to show gratitude. He has the merit – if it is one – of saying exactly what he means. He has rooms he does not value, and he thinks you would value them. He no more thought of putting you under an obligation than he thought of being polite. It is so difficult – at least, I find it difficult – to understand people who speak the truth.”

— E. M. Forster

493. “She did not acknowledge that her brain was warped, for the brain itself must assist in that acknowledgement, and she was disordering the very instruments of life.”

— E. M. Forster

494. “He will work off his crudities in time. I rather mistrust young men who slip into life gracefully.”

— E. M. Forster

495. “An efficiency-regime cannot be run without a few heroes stuck about it to carry off the dullness – much as plums have to be put into bad pudding to make it palatable.”

— E. M. Forster

496. “We are conventional people, and conventions – if you will but see it – are majestic in their way, and will claim us in the end. We do not live for great passions or for great memories, or for anything great.”

— E. M. Forster

497. “One. Margaret’s own faith held firm. She knew the human soul will be merged, if it be merged at all, with the stars and the sea.”

— E. M. Forster

498. “The idealism and the brutality that ran through boyhood had joined at last, and twined into love.”

— E. M. Forster

499. “And the triviality faded from their faces, though it left something behind – the knowledge that they could never be parted because their love was rooted in common things.”

— E. M. Forster

500. “For the barrier of language is sometimes a blessed barrier, which only lets pass what is good. Or – to put the thing less cynically – we may be better in new clean words, which have never been tainted by our pettiness or vice. Phillip, at all events, lived more graciously in Italian, the very phrases of which entice one to be happy and kind.”

— E. M. Forster