"I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves."
— E.M. Forster

"How do I know what I think until I see what I say?"
— E.M. Forster

"Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake."
— E.M. Forster

"If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country"
— E.M. Forster

"'It is fate that I am here,' George persisted, 'but you can call it Italy if it makes you less unhappy.'"
— E.M. Forster (A Room With a View)

"I do like Christmas on the whole.... In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year."
— E.M. Forster

"Take an old man's word; there's nothing worse than a muddle in all the world. 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 the things that I might have avoided. We can help one another but little. I used to think I could teach young people the whole of life, but I know better now, and all my teaching of George has come down to this: beware of muddle."
— E.M. Forster (A Room With a View)

"One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it. "
— E.M. Forster

"If we act the truth the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run"
— E.M. Forster

"I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult."
— E.M. Forster

"What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote."
— E.M. Forster

"I seem fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or moving it — and I'm sure I can't tell you whether the fate's good or evil. I don't die — I don't fall in love. And if other people die or fall in love they always do it when I'm just not there."
— E.M. Forster (Where Angels Fear To Tread)

"We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us."
— E.M. Forster

"Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand."
— E.M. Forster

"It isn't possible to love and to part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal."
— E.M. Forster (A Room With a View)

"Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time - beautiful?"
— E.M. Forster

"She had come to that state where the horror of the universe and its smallness are both visible at the same time—the twilight of the double vision in which so many elderly people are involved. If this world is not to our taste, well, at all events, there is Heaven, Hell, Annihilation—one or other of those large things, that huge scenic background of stars, fires, blue or black air. All heroic endeavour, and all that is known as art, assumes that there is such a background, just as all practical endeavour, when the world is to our taste, assumes that the world is all. But in the twilight of the double vision, a spiritual muddledom is set up for which no high-sounding words can be found; we can neither act nor refrain from action, we can neither ignore nor respect Infinity."
— E.M. Forster (A Passage to India)

"Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice."
— E.M. Forster (A Room with a View)

"If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting--both for us and for her."
— E.M. Forster

"I am a Jane Austenite, and therefore slightly imbecile about Jane Austen. My fatuous expression, and airs of personal immunity-how ill they sit on the face, say,of a Stevensonian! But Jane Austen is so different. She is my favourite author! I read and reread, the mouth open and the mind closed. Shut up in measureless content, I greet her by the name of most kind hostess, while criticism slumbers."
— E.M. Forster

"Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon."
— E.M. Forster

"Only connect!"
— E.M. Forster (Howards End)

"Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer"
— E.M. Forster

"My conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it."
— E.M. Forster

"When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made."
— E.M. Forster (A Room With a View)

"Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West."
— E.M. Forster

"She loved him absolutely, perhaps for half an hour."
— E.M. Forster

"The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty."
— E.M. Forster (Howards End)

"If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious."
— E.M. Forster

"She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position; it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship."
— E.M. Forster (A Room With a View)

". . . Nature pulls one way and human nature another."
— E.M. Forster (Howards End)

"By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes--a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes."
— E.M. Forster

"In Europe life retreats out of the cold, and exquisite fireside myths have resulted—Balder, Persephone—but [in India] the retreat is from the source of life, the treacherous sun, and no poetry adorns it because disillusionment cannot be beautiful. Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form, and India fails to accommodate them."
— E.M. Forster (A Passage to India)

"Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a little of her grim secret to her friends, but not too much; she had shut up her heart--almost, but not entirely. It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave."
— E.M. Forster (Howards End)

"She could not explain in so many words, but she felt that those who prepare for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy."
— E.M. Forster (Howards End)

"A humanist has four leading characteristics - curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race."
— E.M. Forster

"[T]he novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them."
— E.M. Forster

"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

"A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself. "
— E.M. Forster

"I believe in aristocracy, though -- if that is the right word, and if a democrat may use it. Not an aristocracy of power, based upon rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secreat understanding between them when they meet. They represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos. Thousands of them perish in obscurity, a few are great names. They are sensitive for others as well as themselves, they are considerate without being fussy, their pluck is not swankiness but power to endure, and they can take a joke."
— E.M. Forster (Two Cheers for Democracy)

"A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man."
— E.M. Forster (Howards End)

"Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him."
— E.M. Forster (Howards End)

"They had nothing in common but the English language."
— E.M. Forster

""We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us." "
— E.M. Forster

"Of all means to regeneration, Remorse is surely the most wasteful."
— E.M. Forster

"They wept for humanity, those two, not for themselves. They could not bear that this should be the end. Ere silence was completed their hearts were opened, and they knew what had been important on the earth. Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. Century after century had he toiled, and here was his reward. Truly the garment had seemed heavenly at first, shot with colours of culture, sewn with the threads of self-denial. And heavenly it had been so long as man could shed it at will and live by the essence that is his soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is his body. The sin against the body - it was for that they wept in chief; the centuries of wrong against the muscles and the nerves, and those five portals by which we can alone apprehend - glozing it over with talk of evolution, until the body was white pap, the home of ideas as colourless, last sloshy stirrings of a spirit that had grasped the stars. "
— E.M. Forster

""I taught him," he quavered, "to trust in love. I said: 'When love comes, that is reality.' I said: 'Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.'""
— E.M. Forster

""I only know what it is that's wrong with him; not why it is."
"And what is it?" asked Lucy fearfully, expecting some harrowing tale.
"The old trouble; things won't fit."
"What things?"
"The things of the universe. It's quite true. They don't."
"Oh Mr. Emerson, whatever do you mean?"
In his ordinary voice, so that she scarcely realized he was quoting poetry, he said:

"'From far, from eve and morning,
And yon twelve-winded sky,
The stuff of life to knit me
Blew hither: here am I."

"George and I both know this, but why does it distress him? We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all of life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice. I don't believe in this world of sorrow.""
— E.M. Forster

"It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons. It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and, close below, Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road."
— E.M. Forster (A Room With a View)

"And the goblins--they had not really been there at all? They were only the phantoms of cowardice and unbelief? One healthy human impulse would dispel them? Men like the Wilcoxes, or ex-President Roosevelt, would say yes. Beethoven knew better. The goblins really had been there. They might return--and they did. It was as if the splendour of life might boil over and waste to steam and froth. In its dissolution one heard the terrible, ominous note, and a goblin, with increased malignity, walked quietly over the universe from end to end. Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! Even the flaming ramparts of the world might fall. Beethoven chose to make all right in the end. He built the ramparts up. He blew with his mouth for the second time, and again the goblins were scattered. He brought back the gusts of splendour, the heroism, the youth, the magnificence of life and of death, and, amid vast roarings of a superhuman joy, he led his Fifth Symphony to its conclusion. But the goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things."
— E.M. Forster (Howards End)