Top 500 E. M. Forster Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 3 of 10

101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

108. “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

109. “And Englishmen like posing as gods.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

111. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

119. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

123. “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

124. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

127. “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

128. “Do not be proud of your inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped like this. It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive and truthful.”

— E. M. Forster

129. “Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

131. “If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting – both for us and for her.”

— E. M. Forster

132. “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

133. “Pathos, piety, courage, they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

135. “It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die – neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.”

— E. M. Forster

136. “I’m a holy man minus the holiness. Hand that on to your three spies, and tell them to put it in their pipes.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

138. “I’d far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.”

— E. M. Forster

139. “If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.”

— E. M. Forster

140. “Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho–Yung thought Chi–Bo–Sing thought LafcadioHearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution.”

— E. M. Forster

141. “The traveller who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it.”

— E. M. Forster

142. “Do you suppose there’s any difference between spring in nature and spring in man? But there we go, praising the one and condemning the other as improper, ashamed that the same laws work eternally through both.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

144. “We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.”

— E. M. Forster

145. “In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.”

— E. M. Forster

146. “A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

148. “The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.”

— E. M. Forster

149. “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

150. “The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.”

— E. M. Forster