Top 500 E. M. Forster Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “I am swathed in cant’, she thought, ’and it is good for me to be stripped of it.”

— E. M. Forster

202. “I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It’s one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.”

— E. M. Forster

203. “Those who search for truth are too conscious of the maze to be hard on others.”

— E. M. Forster

204. “Growing old is an emotion which comes over us at almost any age; I had it myself between the ages of 25 and 30.”

— E. M. Forster

205. “Passion should believe itself irresistible. It should forget civility and consideration and all the other curses of a refined nature. Above all, it should never ask for leave where there is a right of way.”

— E. M. Forster

206. “England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.”

— E. M. Forster

207. “To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.”

— E. M. Forster

208. “As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take this examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one would be a penny the stupider.”

— E. M. Forster

209. “When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else. Blessed are the uneducated, who forget it entirely, and are never conscious of folly or pruriency in the past, of long aimless conversations.”

— E. M. Forster

210. “Italy is such a delightful place to live in if you happen to be a man. There one may enjoy that exquisite luxury of Socialism – that true Socialism which is based not on equality of income or character, but on the equality of manners.”

— E. M. Forster

211. “I hated the idleness, the stupidity, the respectability, the petty unselfishness.”

— E. M. Forster

212. “Don’t believe those lies about intellectual people. They’re only written to soothe the majority.”

— E. M. Forster

213. “Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.”

— E. M. Forster

214. “She strove in vain against the echoing walls of their civility.”

— E. M. Forster

215. “I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England’s.”

— E. M. Forster

216. “London was but a foretaste of this nomadic civilization which is altering human nature so profoundly, and throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever borne before. Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force that once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone. May Love be equal to the task!”

— E. M. Forster

217. “I won’t be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.”

— E. M. Forster

218. “The sky settles everything – not only climates and seasons but when the earth shall be beautiful.”

— E. M. Forster

219. “You do care a little for me, I know... but nothing to speak of, and you don’t love me. I was yours once till death if you’d cared to keep me, but I’m someone else’s now... and he’s mine in a way that shocks you, but why don’t you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness.”

— E. M. Forster

220. “I was yours once ’till death if you’d cared to keep me, but I’m someone else’s now – I can’t hang about whining forever – and he’s mine in a way that shocks you, but why don’t you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness?”

— E. M. Forster

221. “It was not that ladies were inferior to men; it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself she would be first censured, then despised, and finally ignored.”

— E. M. Forster

222. “In the dawn of the world our weakly must be exposed on Mount Taygetus, in its twilight our strong will suffer euthanasia, that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress eternally.”

— E. M. Forster

223. “The Machine is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition: the Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is the Machine.”

— E. M. Forster

224. “When we poor blacks take bribes, we perform what we are bribed to perform, and the law discovers us in consequence. The English take and do nothing. I admire them.”

— E. M. Forster

225. “People never touched one another. The custom had become obsolete, owing to the Machine.”

— E. M. Forster

226. “Man can learn everything if he will but try.”

— E. M. Forster

227. “We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.”

— E. M. Forster

228. “The past is devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards.”

— E. M. Forster

229. “Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken.”

— E. M. Forster

230. “But it struck him that people are not really dead until they are felt to be dead. As long as there is some misunderstanding about them, they possess a sort of immortality.”

— E. M. Forster

231. “You show so very clearly that intelligence and sympathy are superficial – good enough things in their way – they do what they can and would gladly do more; but the real thing is “being there”, and the worst of it is, no two human beings can be in the same place.”

— E. M. Forster

232. “The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her armchair she spoke, while they in their armchairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well.”

— E. M. Forster

233. “A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.”

— E. M. Forster

234. “The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.”

— E. M. Forster

235. “Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!”

— E. M. Forster

236. “The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken.”

— E. M. Forster

237. “Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.”

— E. M. Forster

238. “We move between two darknesses.”

— E. M. Forster

239. “She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position; it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship.”

— E. M. Forster

240. “If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious.”

— E. M. Forster

241. “It is the starved imagination, not the well nourished, that is afraid.”

— E. M. Forster

242. “There are moments when the inner life actually ‘pays,’ when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.”

— E. M. Forster

243. “If we act the truth the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run.”

— E. M. Forster

244. “He was thinking of the irony of friendship – so strong it is, and so fragile. We fly together, like straws in an eddy, to part in the open stream.”

— E. M. Forster

245. “Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.”

— E. M. Forster

246. “Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element – direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine – the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution.”

— E. M. Forster

247. “Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown.”

— E. M. Forster

248. “Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.”

— E. M. Forster

249. “It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.”

— E. M. Forster

250. “How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who cannot find their way home. India knows of their trouble. She knows of the whole world’s trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls “Come” through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal.”

— E. M. Forster