Top 500 E. M. Forster Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

355. “Your soul, dear Lucy! I hate the word now, because of all the cant with which superstition has wrapped it round. But we have souls, and I see you ruining yours. I cannot bear it.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

357. “I did not fear that I might tread upon a live rail and be killed. I feared something far more intangible-doing what was not contemplated by the Machine. Then I said to myself, “Man is the measure”, and I went, and after many visits I found an opening.”

— E. M. Forster

358. “Life – No, I’ve nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.”

— E. M. Forster

359. “It happened like this, if it happened at all. I would rather go up to heaven by myself than be pushed by cherubs.”

— E. M. Forster

360. “It is easy to face Death and Fate, and the things that sound so dreadful. It is on my muddles that I look back with horror – on thethings that I might have avoided.”

— E. M. Forster

361. “This desire to govern a woman – it lies very deep, and men and women must fight it together... But I do love you surely in a better way than he does.” He thought. “Yes – really in a better way. I want you to have your own thoughts even when I hold you in my arms.”

— E. M. Forster

362. “A slow nature such as Maurice’s appears insensitive, for it needs time even to feel. Its instinct is to assume that nothing either for good or evil has happened, and to resist the invader. Once gripped, it feels acutely, and its sensations in love are particularly profound. Given time, it can know and impart ecstasy; given time, it can sink to the heart of Hell.”

— E. M. Forster

363. “Human beings have their great chance in the novel.”

— E. M. Forster

364. “Belfastas uncivilised as ever – savage black mothers in houses of dark red brick, friendly manufacturers too drunk to entertain you when you arrive. It amuses me till I get tired.”

— E. M. Forster

365. “The Waves is an extraordinary achievement... It is trembling on the edge. A little less – and it would lose its poetry. A little more – and it would be over into the abyss, and be dull and arty. It is her greatest book.”

— E. M. Forster

366. “All this fame and money, which have so thrilled me when they came to others, leave me cold when they come to me. I am not an ascetic, but I don’t know what to do with them, and my daily life has never been so trying, and there is no one to fill it emotionally.”

— E. M. Forster

367. “Silence and loneliness cannot last for ever. It may be a hundred or a thousand years, but the sea lasts longer, and she shall come out of it and sing.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

372. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

375. “The aims of battle and the fruits of conquest are never the same;.”

— E. M. Forster

376. “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

377. “The world is certainly full of beautiful things, if only I could come across them.”

— E. M. Forster

378. “Though life is very glorious, it is difficult.”

— E. M. Forster

379. “As is Man to the Universe, so was the mind of Mr. Wilcox to the minds of some men – a concentrated light upon a tiny spot, a little Ten Minutes moving self-contained through its appointed years. No Pagan he, who lives for the Now, and may be wiser than all philosophers. He lived for the five minutes that have past, and the five to come; he had the business mind.”

— E. M. Forster

380. “Intuition attracts those who wish to be spiritual without any bother, because it promises a heaven where the intuitions of others can be ignored.”

— E. M. Forster

381. “Did you ever dream you had a friend, Alec? Someone to last your whole life and you his. I suppose such a thing can’t really happen outside sleep.”

— E. M. Forster

382. “I really don’t know what happens next – one so seldom does.”

— E. M. Forster

383. “It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted.”

— E. M. Forster

384. “He had awoken too late for happiness, but not for strength, and could feel an austere joy, as of a warrior who is homeless but stands fully armed.”

— E. M. Forster

385. “Life had proved a blind alley, with a muck heap at the end of it, and he must cut back and start again.”

— E. M. Forster

386. “The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.”

— E. M. Forster

387. “A critic has no right to the narrowness which is the frequent prerogative of the creative artist.”

— E. M. Forster

388. “And if insight were sufficient, if the inner life were the whole of life, their happiness has been assured.”

— E. M. Forster

389. “Standing each by his monster, they looked at each other, and smiled.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

391. “We reach in desperation beyond the fog, beyond the very stars, the voids of the universe are ransacked to justify the monster, and stamped with a human face. London is religions opportunity – not the decorous religion of theologians, but an anthropomorphic, crude. Yes, the continuous flow would be tolerable if a man of our own sort – not anyone pompous or tearful – were caring for us up in the sky.”

— E. M. Forster

392. “Freedom does not guarantee masterpieces.”

— E. M. Forster

393. “Pity, if one can generalize, is at the bottom of woman. When men like us, it is for our better qualities, and however tender their liking, we dare not be unworthy of it, or they will quietly let us go. But unworthiness stimulates woman. It brings out her deeper nature, for good or for evil.”

— E. M. Forster

394. “Maurice hated cricket. It demanded a snickety neatness he could not supply.”

— E. M. Forster

395. “What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives? They have never entered into mine, but into yours, we thought – Haven’t we all to struggle against life’s daily greyness, against pettiness, against mechanical cheerfulness, against suspicion? I struggle by remembering my friends; others I have known by remembering some place – some beloved place or tree – we thought you one of these.”

— E. M. Forster

396. “Reverence is fatal to literature.”

— E. M. Forster

397. “They cared for no one, they were outside humanity, and death, had it come, would only have continued their pursuit of a retreating horizon.”

— E. M. Forster

398. “Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a great mistake and degenerates into defensiveness or hypocrisy.”

— E. M. Forster

399. “I never could get on with representative individuals but people who existed on their own account and with whom it might therefore be possible to be friends.”

— E. M. Forster

400. “I don’t think literature will be purged until its philosophic pretentiousness is extruded, and I shant live to see that purge, nor perhaps when it has happened will anything survive.”

— E. M. Forster