E.M. Forster > Quotes

“It isn't possible to love and 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

“How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”
― E.M. Forster

“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

“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

“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

“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

“I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.”
― 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

“Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View / Howards End

“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 then 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, A Room with a View

“Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room With A View

“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

“Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“Only connect!”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.”
― 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

“I cannot help thinking that there is something to admire in everyone, even if you do not approve of them.”
― 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

“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

“She loved him absolutely, perhaps for half an hour.”
― 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

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

“Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“Adventures do occur, but not punctually.”
― E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

“We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.”
― 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

“You do care a little for me, I know... but nothing to speak of, and you don't love me. I was yours once till death if you'd cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now... and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop deing shocked, and attend to your own happiness.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“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, A Room with a View

“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

“You confuse what's important with what's impressive.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“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

“There's enough sorrow in the world, isn't there, without trying to invent it.”
― 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

“The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“Passion should believe itself irresistible. It should forget civility and consideration and all the other curses of a refined nature. Above all, it should never ask for leave where there is a right of way.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“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, Maurice

“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

“By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes--a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“It's not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.”
― E.M. Forster, The Longest Journey

“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 of Democracy

“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, Howard's End

“The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.”
― E.M. Forster

“She only felt that the candle would burn better, the packing go easier, the world be happier, if she could give and receive some human love.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.”
― E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

“It is so difficult-at least, I find it difficult-to understand people who speak the truth.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View