Top 500 E. M. Forster Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Sometimes I think too much fuss is made about marriage. Century after century of carnal embracement and we’re still no nearer to understanding one another.”

— E. M. Forster

52. “We may divide characters into flat and round.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

54. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

56. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

58. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

62. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

64. “Society is invincible – to a certain degree. But your real life is your own, and nothing can touch it. There is no power on earth that can prevent your criticizing and despising mediocrity – nothing that can stop you retreating into splendour and beauty – into the thoughts and beliefs that make the real life – the real you.”

— E. M. Forster

65. “Fa niente, sono vecchia.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

67. “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

68. “I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

70. “All a child’s life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes – morals, behavior, everything. Absolute trust in someone else is the essence of education.”

— E. M. Forster

71. “I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man’s pleasure when they come a cropper.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

73. “All men are equal – all men, that is, who possess umbrellas.”

— E. M. Forster

74. “The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power.”

— E. M. Forster

75. “The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal. Both assumptions are false: both of them must be accepted as true if we are to go on eating and working and loving, and are to keep open a few breathing holes for the human spirit.”

— E. M. Forster

76. “My law-givers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

78. “I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

81. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

85. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

87. “I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

89. “Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.”

— E. M. Forster

90. “Money pads the edges of things.”

— E. M. Forster

91. “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

92. “But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.”

— E. M. Forster

93. “Tulips were a tray of jewels.”

— E. M. Forster

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

97. “Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

99. “Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven.”

— E. M. Forster

100. “Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.”

— E. M. Forster