Top 500 E. M. Forster Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 10

51. “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

52. “Don’t go fighting against the Spring.”

— E. M. Forster

53. “I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.”

— E. M. Forster

54. “Chess is a forcing house where the fruits of character can ripen more fully than in life.”

— E. M. Forster

55. “The sun was already declining and each of the trees held a premonition of night.”

— E. M. Forster

56. “At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.”

— E. M. Forster

57. “Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.”

— E. M. Forster

58. “Fa niente, sono vecchia.”

— E. M. Forster

59. “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

60. “One’s favorite book is as elusive as one’s favorite pudding.”

— E. M. Forster

61. “He educated Maurice, or rather his spirit educated Maurice’s spirit, for they themselves became equal. Neither thought “Am I led; am I leading?” Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection.”

— E. M. Forster

62. “It is so difficult – at least, I find it difficult – to understand people who speak the truth.”

— E. M. Forster

63. “There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.”

— E. M. Forster

64. “I am an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.”

— E. M. Forster

65. “Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.”

— E. M. Forster

66. “School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.”

— E. M. Forster

67. “You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.”

— E. M. Forster

68. “Adventures do occur, but not punctually.”

— E. M. Forster

69. “Think before you speak is criticism’s motto; speak before you think, creation’s.”

— E. M. Forster

70. “Don’t be mysterious; there isn’t the time.”

— E. M. Forster

71. “Are not beauty and delicacy the same?”

— E. M. Forster

72. “The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.”

— E. M. Forster

73. “The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected.”

— E. M. Forster

74. “Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull.”

— E. M. Forster

75. “The crime of suicide lies rather in its disregard for the feelings of those whom we leave behind.”

— E. M. Forster

76. “Tolerance is a very dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is negative. It merely means putting up with people, being able to stand things.”

— E. M. Forster

77. “Expansion, that is the idea the novelist must cling to, not completion, not rounding off, but opening out.”

— E. M. Forster

78. “Money pads the edges of things.”

— E. M. Forster

79. “The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.”

— E. M. Forster

80. “It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven.”

— E. M. Forster

81. “But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else.”

— E. M. Forster

82. “Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.”

— E. M. Forster

83. “Human relations are impossible. When they are real they are uncomfortable, and when they are comfortable they are unreal. It was for the journey into solitude that the human soul was created.”

— E. M. Forster

84. “The historian records, but the novelist creates.”

— E. M. Forster

85. “Riposte of “that old lady in the anecdote who was accused by her nieces of being illogical,” Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish! How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?”

— E. M. Forster

86. “My conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.”

— E. M. Forster

87. “The hungry and the homeless don’t care about liberty any more than they care about cultural heritage. To pretend that they do care is cant.”

— E. M. Forster

88. “For you cannot have gentility without paying for it.”

— E. M. Forster

89. “The emotions may be endless. The more we express them, the more we may have to express.”

— E. M. Forster

90. “For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.”

— E. M. Forster

91. “It was unbearable, and he thought again, ‘How unhappy I am!’ and became happier.”

— E. M. Forster

92. “Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don’t believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art’s sake.”

— E. M. Forster

93. “My father says that there is only one perfect view – the view of the sky straight over our heads, and that all these views on earth are but bungled copies of it.”

— E. M. Forster

94. “I cannot help thinking that there is something to admire in everyone, even if you do not approve of them.”

— E. M. Forster

95. “At times our need for a sympathetic gesture is so great that we care not what exactly it signifies or how much we may have to pay for it afterwards.”

— E. M. Forster

96. “There are occasions when I would rather feel like a fly than a spider.”

— E. M. Forster

97. “The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.”

— E. M. Forster

98. “I am actually what my age and my upbringing have made me – a bourgeois who adheres to the British constitution, adheres to it rather than supports it, and the fact that this isn’t dignified doesn’t worry me.”

— E. M. Forster

99. “It isn’t possible to love and to part.”

— E. M. Forster

100. “People in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed.”

— E. M. Forster