Top 500 E. M. Forster Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

408. “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

409. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

411. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

414. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

417. “Vagueness spurred him into knight errantry.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

427. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

429. “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

430. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

432. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

434. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

437. “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

438. “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

439. “A chance word or a sigh are just as much evidence as a speech or a murder: the life they reveal ceases to be secret and enters the realm of action.”

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

441. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

443. “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

444. “The issues Miss Quested had raised were so much more important than she was herself that people inevitably forgot her.”

— E. M. Forster

445. “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

446. “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

447. “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

448. “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

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

— E. M. Forster

450. “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