Top 500 E. M. Forster Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Life – No, I’ve nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.”

— E. M. Forster

352. “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

353. “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

354. “It is the little things one bungles at. The big, real ones are nothing when they come.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

356. “It is never possible for a novelist to deny time inside the fabric of his novel: he must cling, however lightly, to the thread of his story, he must touch the interminable tapeworm, otherwise he becomes unintelligible, which, in his case, is a blunder.”

— E. M. Forster

357. “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

358. “I believed in a return to Nature once. But how can we return to Nature when we have never been with her? Today, I believe that we must discover Nature. After many conquests we shall attain simplicity. It is our heritage.”

— E. M. Forster

359. “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

360. “Things that are indelicate can sometimes be beautiful.”

— E. M. Forster

361. “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

362. “The Arts are not drugs. They are not guaranteed to act when taken. Something as mysterious and capricious as the creative impulse has to be released before they can act.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

365. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “Don’t brood too much,” she wrote to Helen, “on the superiority of the unseen to the seen. It’s true, but to brood on it is medieval. Our business is not to contrast the two, but to reconcile them.”

— E. M. Forster

378. “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

379. “Life’s very difficult and full of surprises. At all events, I’ve got as far as that. To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged – well, one can’t do all these things at once, worse luck, because they’re so contradictory. It’s then that proportion comes in – to live by proportion. Don’t begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed...”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

381. “But Italy worked some marvel in her. It gave her light...”

— E. M. Forster

382. “The present flowed by them like a stream. The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment. The moment had passed. The tree rustled again. Their senses were sharpened, and they seemed to apprehend life. Life passed. The tree rustled again.”

— E. M. Forster

383. “Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him – that is the best account of it that has been yet given. Squalor and tragedy can beckon to all that is great in us; and strengthen the wings of love.”

— E. M. Forster

384. “They have yielded to the only enemy that matters – the enemy within.”

— E. M. Forster

385. “He was inaccurate because he was sensitive.”

— E. M. Forster

386. “Gray clouds were charging across tissues of white, which stretched and shredded and tore slowly, until through their final layers there gleamed a hint of the disappearing blue. Summer was retreating. The wind roared, the trees groaned, yet the noise seemed insufficient for those vast operations in heaven. The weather was breaking up, breaking, broken, and it is a sense of the fit rather than of the supernatural that equips such crises with the salvos of angelic artillery.”

— E. M. Forster

387. “Petty unselfishness,” she repeated. “I had got an idea that every one here spent their lives in making little sacrifices for objects they didn’t care for, to please people they didn’t love; that they never learnt to be sincere – and, what’s as bad, never learnt how to enjoy themselves.”

— E. M. Forster

388. “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

389. “Oh, horrible – worst of all – worse than death, when you have made a little clearing in the wilderness, planted your little garden, let in your sunlight, and then the weeds creep in again!”

— E. M. Forster

390. “To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art.”

— E. M. Forster

391. “I do not consider her choice of a piece happy. Beethoven is so usually simple and direct in his appeal that it is sheer perversity to choose a thing like that, which, if anything, disturbs.”

— E. M. Forster

392. “She was no longer examining life, but being examined by it; she had become a real person.”

— E. M. Forster

393. “Freedom does not guarantee masterpieces.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

395. “You mustn’t put off what you think right,” said Hamidullah. “That is why India is in such a plight, because we put off things.”

— 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. “Give, do not lend; after death who will thank you?”

— E. M. Forster