Top 500 E. M. Forster Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “Nature pulls one way and human nature another.”

— E. M. Forster

103. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

105. “I do not believe in Belief.”

— E. M. Forster

106. “One is certain of nothing but the truth of one’s own emotions.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

108. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

110. “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

111. “Democracy is not a Beloved Republic really, and never will be. But it is less hateful than other contemporary forms of government, and to that extent deserves our support.”

— E. M. Forster

112. “There’s enough sorrow in the world, isn’t there, without trying to invent it.”

— E. M. Forster

113. “It’s better to be fooled than to be suspicious – that the confidence trick is the work of man, but the want-of-confidence trick is the work of the devil.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

115. “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

116. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

118. “This constant reference to genius is another characteristic of the pseudo-scholar. He loves mentioning genius, because the sound of the word exempts him from discovering its meaning.”

— E. M. Forster

119. “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

120. “Love is always being given where it is not required.”

— E. M. Forster

121. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

124. “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

125. “She was like a woman of Leonardo Da Vinci’s, whom we love not so much for herself as for the things that she will not tell us.”

— E. M. Forster

126. “This element of surprise or mystery the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called is of great importance in a plot.”

— E. M. Forster

127. “This is Ahab, that’s Jezebel,” said Evie, who was one of those who name animals after the less successful characters of Old Testament history.”

— E. M. Forster

128. “No one confessed the Machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence. The better a man knew his own duties upon it, the less he understood the duties of his neighbor, and in all the world there was not one who understood the monster as a whole. Those master brains had perished.”

— E. M. Forster

129. “How indeed is it possible for one human being to be sorry for all the sadness that meets him on the face of the earth, for the pain that is endured not only by men, but by animals and plants, and perhaps by the stones? The soul is tired in a moment, and in fear of losing the little she does understand, she retreats to the permanent lines which habit or chance have dictated, and suffers there.”

— E. M. Forster

130. “One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.”

— E. M. Forster

131. “Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.”

— E. M. Forster

132. “In the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life.”

— E. M. Forster

133. “And Englishmen like posing as gods.”

— E. M. Forster

134. “There stood a young man who had the figure of a Greek athlete and the face of an English one... Just where he began to be beautiful the clothes started.”

— E. M. Forster

135. “There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.”

— E. M. Forster

136. “There are many ways of being a man; mine is to express what is deepest in my heart.”

— E. M. Forster

137. “Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque. A touch will loosen it, and the sooner it goes from us the better.”

— E. M. Forster

138. “A facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade, every type of dubiousness.”

— E. M. Forster

139. “The so called white races are really pinko-grey.”

— E. M. Forster

140. “The ends of the earth, the depths of the sea, the darkness of time, you have chosen all three.”

— E. M. Forster

141. “For the dead, who seem to take away so much, really take with them nothing that is ours. The passion they have aroused lives after them, easy to transmute or to transfer, but well-nigh impossible to destroy.”

— E. M. Forster

142. “I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I’d like to be.”

— E. M. Forster

143. “Solidity, caution, integrity, efficiency. Lack of imagination, hypocrisy. These qualities characterize the middle classes in everycountry, but in England they are national characteristics.”

— E. M. Forster

144. “Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom.”

— E. M. Forster

145. “Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darkness’s.”

— E. M. Forster

146. “They were his last words, because Maurice had disappeared thereabouts, leaving no trace of his presence except a little pile of the petals of the evening primrose, which mourned from the ground like an expiring fire. To the end of his life Clive was not sure of the exact moment of departure, and with the approach of old age he grew uncertain whether the moment had yet occurred.”

— E. M. Forster

147. “The house was very quiet, and the fog – we are in November now – pressed against the windows like an excluded ghost.”

— E. M. Forster

148. “Outside the arch, always there seemed another arch. And beyond the remotest echo, a silence.”

— E. M. Forster

149. “I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”

— E. M. Forster

150. “It is fate that I am here,? George persisted, ’but you can call it Italy if it makes you less unhappy.”

— E. M. Forster