Top 500 E. M. Forster Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

403. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

405. “Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.”

— E. M. Forster

406. “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

407. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

409. “Reverence is fatal to literature.”

— E. M. Forster

410. “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

411. “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

412. “But after all, what have we to do with taverns? Real menace belongs to the drawing-room.”

— E. M. Forster

413. “Man has to pick up the use of his functions as he goes along- especially the function of Love.”

— E. M. Forster

414. “I think he is nice and tiresome. I differ from him on almost every point of any importance, and so, I expect – I may say I hope – you will differ. But his is a type one disagrees with rather than deplores. When he first came here he not unnaturally put people’s backs up. He has no tact and no manners – I don’t mean by that that he has bad manners – and he will not keep his opinions to himself.”

— E. M. Forster

415. “He was driven to use the prerogatives of his profession, to act the parson.”

— E. M. Forster

416. “A thousand little civilities create tenderness in time.”

— E. M. Forster

417. “The melody rose, unprofitably magical. It broke; it was resumed broken, not marching once from the cradle to the grave. The sadness of the incomplete – the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art – throbbed in its disjected phrases, and made the nerves of the audience throb. Not thus had she played on the little draped piano at the Bertolini, and “Too much Schumann” was not the remark that Mr. Beebe had passed to himself when she returned.”

— E. M. Forster

418. “I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows.”

— E. M. Forster

419. “One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.”

— E. M. Forster

420. “An engagement is so potent a thing that sooner or later it reduces all who speak of it to this state of cheerful awe.”

— E. M. Forster

421. “But it is sometimes as difficult to lose one’s temper as it is difficult at other times to keep it.”

— E. M. Forster

422. “She had a strong, if erroneous, conviction of her own futility, and wished she had never come out of her backwater, where nothing happened except art and literature, and where no one ever got married or succeeded in remaining engaged.”

— E. M. Forster

423. “Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.”

— E. M. Forster

424. “There is much good luck in the world, but it is luck. We are none of us safe. We are children, playing or quarrelling on the line.”

— E. M. Forster

425. “Pity wraps the student of the past in an ambrosial cloud, and washes his limbs with eternal youth.”

— E. M. Forster

426. “God is not Love in the East. He is Power, although Mercy may temper it.”

— E. M. Forster

427. “Vagueness spurred him into knight errantry.”

— E. M. Forster

428. “Axiom : Novel must have either one living character or a perfect pattern: fails otherwise.”

— E. M. Forster

429. “Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.”

— E. M. Forster

430. “There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.”

— E. M. Forster

431. “Lucy was suffering from the most grievous wrong which this world has yet discovered: diplomatic advantage had been taken of her sincerity, of her craving for sympathy and love. Such a wrong is not easily forgotten. Never again did she expose herself without due consideration and precaution against rebuff. And such a wrong may react disastrously upon the soul.”

— E. M. Forster

432. “Something had changed. He had journeyed – as on rare occasions a man must – till he stood behind right and wrong. On the banks of the grey torrent of life, love is the only flower.”

— E. M. Forster

433. “He lived on, miserable and misunderstood, as before, and increasingly lonely. One cannot write those words too often: Maurice’s loneliness: it increased.”

— E. M. Forster

434. “Lucy’s Sabbath was generally of this amphibious nature. She kept it without hypocrisy in the morning, and broke it without reluctance in the afternoon.”

— E. M. Forster

435. “She disliked confidences, for they might lead to self-knowledge and to that king of terrors – Light.”

— E. M. Forster

436. “An acquaintance had become a lover, might become a husband, but would retain all that she had noted in the acquaintance; and love must confirm an old relation rather than reveal a new one.”

— E. M. Forster

437. “No one, except Ronny, had any idea of what passed in her mind, and he only dimly, for where there is officialism every human relationship suffers.”

— E. M. Forster

438. “The second dream is more difficult to convey. Nothing happened. He scarcely saw a face, scarcely heard a voice say, “That is your friend,” and then it was over, having filled him with beauty and taught him tenderness. He could die for such a friend, he would allow such a friend to die for him; they would make any sacrifice for each other, and count the world nothing, neither death nor distance nor crossness could part them, because “this is my friend.”

— E. M. Forster

439. “Helen says it alone endures while men and houses perish, and that in the end the world will be a desert of chairs and sofas – just imagine it! – rolling through infinity with no one to sit upon them.”

— E. M. Forster

440. “But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist’s readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters.”

— E. M. Forster

441. “I think – I think – I think how little they think what lies so near them.”

— E. M. Forster

442. “Mr. Ansell was not merely a man of some education; he had what no education can bring – the power of detecting what is important. Like many fathers, he had spared no expense over his boy, – he had borrowed money to start him at a rapacious and fashionable private school; he had sent him to tutors; he had sent him to Cambridge. But he knew that all this was not the important thing. The important thing was freedom.”

— E. M. Forster

443. “Books have to be read it is the only way of discovering what they contain.”

— E. M. Forster

444. “How few writers can prostitute all their powers!”

— E. M. Forster

445. “I rather mistrust young men who slip into life gracefully.”

— E. M. Forster

446. “Not out of them are the shows of history erected: the world would be a grey, bloodless place were it composed entirely of Miss Schlegels. But the world being what it is, perhaps they shine out in it like stars.”

— E. M. Forster

447. “I am so used to seeing the sort of play which deals with one man and two women. They do not leave me with the feeling I have made a full theatrical meal they do not give me the experience of the multiplicity of life.”

— E. M. Forster

448. “Madness is not for everyone, but Maurice’s proved the thunderbolt that dispels the clouds. The storm had been working up not for three days as he supposed, but for six years. It had brewed in the insecurities of being where no eye pierces, his surroundings had thickened it. It had burst and he had not died. The brilliancy of day was around him, he stood upon the mountain range that overshadows youth, he saw.”

— E. M. Forster

449. “Of all means to regeneration, Remorse is surely the most wasteful.”

— E. M. Forster

450. “The feudal ownership of land did bring dignity, whereas the modern ownership of movables is reducing us again to a nomadic horde. We are reverting to the civilisation of luggage, and historians of the future will note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root in the earth, and may find in this the secret of their imaginative poverty.”

— E. M. Forster