Top 500 E. M. Forster Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “It never bored them to hear words, words; they breathed them with the cool night air, never stopping to analyse; the name of the poet, Hafiz, Hali, Iqbal, was sufficient guarantee. India – a hundred Indias – whispered outside beneath the indifferent moon, but for the time India seemed one and their own, and they regained their departed greatness by hearing its departure lamented, they felt young again because reminded that youth must fly.”

— E. M. Forster

302. “At my age one’s seldom amazed,” he said, smiling. “Marriage is too absurd in any case. It begins and continues for such very slight reasons. The social business props it up on one side, and the theological business on the other, but neither of them are marriage, are they? I’ve friends who can’t remember why they married, no more can their wives. I suspect that it mostly happens haphazard, though afterwards various noble reasons are invented. About marriage I am cynical.”

— E. M. Forster

303. “All that is observable in a man-that is to say his actions and such of his spiritual existence as can be deduced from his actions-falls into the domain of history.”

— E. M. Forster

304. “It’s not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.”

— E. M. Forster

305. “To attribute these two great developments to the Central Committee, is to take a very narrow view of civilization. The Central Committee announced the developments, it is true, but they were no more the cause of them than were the kings of the imperialistic period the cause of war.”

— E. M. Forster

306. “Had he lived some centuries ago, in the brightly coloured civilizations of the past, he would have had a definite status, his rank and his income would have corresponded. But in his day the angel of Democracy had arisen, enshadowing the classes with leathern wings, and proclaiming, “All men are equal – all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas...”

— E. M. Forster

307. “Of course he despised the world as a whole; every thoughtful man should; it is almost a test of refinement.”

— E. M. Forster

308. “But he saw only dying light and a dead land. He uttered no prayer, believed in no deity, and knew that the past was devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards.”

— E. M. Forster

309. “It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why history is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead.”

— E. M. Forster

310. “No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.”

— E. M. Forster

311. “One grows accustomed to being praised, or being blamed, or being advised, but it is unusual to be understood.”

— E. M. Forster

312. “I only wish the poets would say this too: love is of the body; not the body, but of the the body. Ah! the misery that would be saved if we confessed that! Ah! for a little directness to liberate the soul!”

— E. M. Forster

313. “She watched the moon, whose radiance stained with primrose the purple of the surrounding sky. In England the moon had seemed dead and alien; here she was caught in the shawl of night together with earth and all the other stars.”

— E. M. Forster

314. “A happy ending was imperative.”

— E. M. Forster

315. “The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world.”

— E. M. Forster

316. “England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature – for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk.”

— E. M. Forster

317. “Like his sister and like most young people, he was naturally attracted by the idea of equality, and the undeniable fact that there are different kinds of Emersons annoyed him beyond measure.”

— E. M. Forster

318. “The strong are so stupid.”

— E. M. Forster

319. “Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.”

— E. M. Forster

320. “But this time I’m not to blame; I want you to believe that. I simply slipped into those violets. No, I want to be really truthful. I am a little to blame. The sky, you know, was gold, and the ground all blue, and for a moment he looked like some one in a book.”

— E. M. Forster

321. “They must live outside class, without relations or money; they must work and stick to each other till death. But England belonged to them. That, besides companionship, was their reward. Her air and sky were theirs, not the timorous millions’ who own stuffy little boxes, but never their own souls.”

— E. M. Forster

322. “Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead nowhere.”

— E. M. Forster

323. “Italy was offering her the most priceless of all possessions – her own soul.”

— E. M. Forster

324. “The ethereal past had blinded him, and the highest happiness he could dream was a return to it.”

— E. M. Forster

325. “Love was an emotion through which you occasionally enjoyed yourself. It could not do things.”

— E. M. Forster

326. “When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else.”

— E. M. Forster

327. “But books meant so much for him he forgot that they were a bewilderment to others.”

— E. M. Forster

328. “Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice, and we welcome ‘nerves’ or any other shibboleth that will cloak our personal desire.”

— E. M. Forster

329. “Ah, but you see, I didn’t want to be fair.”

— E. M. Forster

330. “No disease of the imagination is so difficult to cure, as that which is complicated with the dread of guilt : fancy and conscience then act interchangeably upon us, and so often shift their places, that the illusions of one are not distinguished from the dictates of the other.”

— E. M. Forster

331. “And as her love revived, so did her capacity for suffering. Life, more important, grew more bitter.”

— E. M. Forster

332. “Words deserted him immediately. He could only speak when he was not asked to.”

— E. M. Forster

333. “Mr Abrahams was a preparatory schoolmaster of the old-fashioned sort. He cared neither for work nor games, but fed his boys well and saw that they did not misbehave. The rest he left to the parents, and did not speculate how much the parents were leaving to him. Amid mutual compliments the boys passed out into a public school, healthy but backward, to receive upon undefended flesh the first blows of the world.”

— E. M. Forster

334. “The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.”

— E. M. Forster

335. “It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.”

— E. M. Forster

336. “Happiness in the ordinary sense is not what one needs in life, though one is right to aim at it. The true satisfaction is to come through, and see those whom one lives come through.”

— E. M. Forster

337. “The bully and the victim never quite forget their first relations.”

— E. M. Forster

338. “I suppose I shall have to live now.”

— E. M. Forster

339. “She must be assured that it is not a criminal offense to love at first sight.”

— E. M. Forster

340. “Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due – she reminds us too much of a prima donna.”

— E. M. Forster

341. “Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.”

— E. M. Forster

342. “Characters must not brood too long. They must not waste time running up and down ladders in their own insides.”

— E. M. Forster

343. “There’s never any great risk as long as you have money.”

— E. M. Forster

344. “Beautiful?” said Miss Bartlett, puzzled at the word. “Are not beauty and delicacy the same?”

— E. M. Forster

345. “One minute. You know nothing about him. He probably has his own joys and interests- wife, children, snug little home. That’s where we practical fellows’- he smiled-’are more tolerant than you intellectuals. We live and let live, and assume that things are jogging on fairly well elsewhere, and that the ordinary plain man may be trusted to look after his own affairs.”

— E. M. Forster

346. “This solitude opressed her; she was accustomed to have her thoughts confirmed by others or, at all events, contradicted; it was too dreadful not to know whether she was thinking right or wrong.”

— E. M. Forster

347. “Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.”

— E. M. Forster

348. “Here had lived an elder race, to which we look back with disquietude. The country which we visit at week-ends was really a home to it, and the graver sides of life, the deaths, the partings, the yearnings for love, have their deepest expression in the heart of the fields.”

— E. M. Forster

349. “I have always found writing pleasant and don’t understand what people mean by ‘throes of creation.’”

— E. M. Forster

350. “Travel was a species of warfare.”

— E. M. Forster