Top 500 E. M. Forster Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 6 of 10

251. “We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.”

— E. M. Forster

252. “The contest lay not between love and duty. Perhaps there never is such a contest. It lay between the real and the pretended, and Lucy’s first aim was to defeat herself.”

— E. M. Forster

253. “Before the civil war, Pottibakia was a normal member of the Comity of Nations. She erected tariff walls, broke treaties, persecuted minorities, obstructed at conferences unless she was convinced there was no danger of a satisfactory solution; then she strained every nerve in the cause of peace.”

— E. M. Forster

254. “Ideas are fatal to caste.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

256. “You, who have just crossed the Roof of the World, will not want to hear an account of the little hills that I saw – low, colorless hills. But to me they were living and the turf that covered them was a skin, under which their muscles rippled, and I felt that those hills had called with incalculable force to men in the past, and that men had loved them. Now they sleep – perhaps for ever. They commune with humanity in dreams.”

— E. M. Forster

257. “Can what they call civilization be right, if people mayn’t die in the room where they were born?”

— E. M. Forster

258. “Not only in sex, but in all things men have moved blindly, have evolved out of slime to dissolve into it when this accident of consequences is over.”

— E. M. Forster

259. “I was brought up to be honest; the trouble is it gets me nowhere.”

— E. M. Forster

260. “A rebel she was, but not of the kind he understood – a rebel who desired, not a wider dwelling-room, but equality beside the man she loved.”

— E. M. Forster

261. “All men are my brothers and as soon as one behaves as such he may see my wife.”

— E. M. Forster

262. “There has been, is, and always will be every conceivable type of person.”

— E. M. Forster

263. “It is not rubbish! It is the part of people that you do not understand.”

— E. M. Forster

264. “We are all like Scheherazade’s husband, in that we want to know what happens next.”

— E. M. Forster

265. “Sex begins before adolescence, and survives sterility; it is indeed coeval with our lives, although at the mating age its effects are more obvious to Society.”

— E. M. Forster

266. “But let yourself go. You are inclined to get muddled, if I may judge from last night. Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them. By understanding George you may learn to understand yourself. It will be good for both of you.”

— E. M. Forster

267. “Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.”

— E. M. Forster

268. “It is now only in letters I write what I feel: not in literature any more, and I seldom say it, because I keep trying to be amusing.”

— E. M. Forster

269. “I don’t intend him, or any man or any woman, to be all my life – good heavens, no! There are heaps of things in me that he doesn’t, and shall never, understand.”

— E. M. Forster

270. “Italian in the mouth of Italians is a deep-voiced stream, with unexpected cataracts and boulders to preserve it from monotony. In Mr. Eager’s mouth it resembled nothing so much as an acid whistling fountain which played ever higher and higher, and quicker and quicker, and more and more shrilly, till abruptly it was turned off with a click.”

— E. M. Forster

271. “They described the strange feeling of peace that came over them when they handled the Book of the Machine, the pleasure that it was to repeat certain numerals out of it, however little meaning those numerals conveyed to the outward ear, the ecstasy of touching a button, however unimportant, or of ringing an electric bell, however superfluously.”

— E. M. Forster

272. “I am certainly an ought and not a must.”

— E. M. Forster

273. “My conviction,” says the mystic, “gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it,” and they had agreed that there was something beyond life’s daily grey.”

— E. M. Forster

274. “Like every true performer, she was intoxicated by the mere feel of the notes: they were fingers caressing her own; and by touch, not by sound alone, did she come to her desire.”

— E. M. Forster

275. “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

276. “And that is why novels, even when they are about wicked people, can solace us: they suggest a more comprehensible and thus more manageable human race, they give us the illusion of perspicacity and of power.”

— E. M. Forster

277. “Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.”

— E. M. Forster

278. “He had robbed the body of its taint, the world’s taunts of their sting; he had shown her the holiness of direct desire.”

— E. M. Forster

279. “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.”

— E. M. Forster

280. “One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.”

— E. M. Forster

281. “I don’t think I understand people very well. I only know whether I like or dislike them.”

— E. M. Forster

282. “The middle age of buggers is not to be contemplated without horror.”

— E. M. Forster

283. “He had known so much about her once -what she thought, how she felt, the reasons for her actions. And now he only knew that he loved her, and all the other knowledge seemed passing from him just as he needed it most.”

— E. M. Forster

284. “I have always been like the Greeks and didn’t know.”

— E. M. Forster

285. “Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.”

— E. M. Forster

286. “But the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable.”

— E. M. Forster

287. “Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time – beautiful?”

— E. M. Forster

288. “She loved him absolutely, perhaps for half an hour.”

— E. M. Forster

289. “Science, when applied to personal relationships, is always just wrong .”

— E. M. Forster

290. “Then she lay on her back and gazed at the cloudless sky. Mr. Beebe, whose opinion of her rose daily, whispered to his niece that that was the proper way to behave if any little thing went wrong.”

— E. M. Forster

291. “One has two duties – to be worried and not to be worried.”

— E. M. Forster

292. “Reformers who are obsessed with purity and cannot see that their obsession is impure.”

— E. M. Forster

293. “There’s nothing like a debate to teach one quickness. I often wish I had gone in for them when I was a youngster. It would have helped me no end.”

— E. M. Forster

294. “When they sat it was nearly always in the same position – Maurice in a chair, and Durham at his feet, leaning against him. In the world of their friends this attracted no notice. Maurice would stroke Durham’s hair.”

— E. M. Forster

295. “Then she turned westward, to gaze at the swirling gold. Just where the river rounded the hill the sun caught it. Fairyland must lie above the bend, and its precious liquid was pouring towards them past Charles’s bathing shed.”

— E. M. Forster

296. “Beautiful conventions received them – while beyond the barrier Maurice wandered, the wrong words on his lips, the wrong desires in his heart, and his arms full of air.”

— E. M. Forster

297. “Love is the best, and the more she let herself love him, the more chance was there that he would set his soul in order.”

— E. M. Forster

298. “Men were not gods after all, but as human and as clumsy as girls.”

— E. M. Forster

299. “At the moment they vanished they were everywhere, the cool benediction of the night descended, the stars sparkled, and the whole universe was a hill.”

— E. M. Forster

300. “Science explained people, but could not understand them. After long centuries among the bones and muscles it might be advancing to knowledge of the nerves, but this would never give understanding.”

— E. M. Forster