Top 500 E. M. Forster Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.”

— E. M. Forster

452. “Without form, the sensitiveness vanishes.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

455. “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

456. “A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.”

— E. M. Forster

457. “They travelled for thirteen hours down-hill, whilst the streams broadened and the mountains shrank, and the vegetation changed, and the people ceased being ugly and drinking beer, and began instead to drink wine and to be beautiful.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

459. “If only the sense of actuality can be lulled-and it sleeps for ever in most historians-there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

461. “Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.”

— E. M. Forster

462. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

464. “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

465. “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

466. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

469. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

474. “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

475. “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

476. “It was the hour of unreality.”

— E. M. Forster

477. “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

478. “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

479. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

482. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

485. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

487. “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

488. “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

489. “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

490. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

493. “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

494. “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

495. “Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection.”

— E. M. Forster

496. “She was appallingly narrow, but her consciousness of wider things gave to her narrowness a pathetic charm.”

— E. M. Forster

497. “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

498. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

500. “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