The Complete E. M. Forster Collection Quotes

“He felt that nonsense and beauty have close connections,—closer connections than Art will allow,—and that both would remain when his own heaviness and his own ugliness had perished.”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“There are moments when the inner life actually “pays,” when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.  Such moments are still rare in the West; that they come at all promises a fairer future.”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“Perhaps anything that he did would have pleased Lucy, but his awkwardness went straight to her heart; men were not gods after all, but as human and as clumsy as girls; even men might suffer from unexplained desires, and need help.”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice,”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“And of all means to regeneration Remorse is surely the most wasteful.  It cuts away healthy tissues with the poisoned. It is a knife that probes far deeper than the evil.”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“The mask fell off the city, and she saw it for what it really is--a caricature of infinity.”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“she had outgrown stimulants, and was passing from words to things.  It was doubtless a pity not to keep up with Wedekind or John, but some closing of the gates is inevitable after thirty, if the mind itself is to become a creative power.”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth.  Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force that they once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone.  May Love be equal to the task!”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“she felt that there was something a little unbalanced in the mind that so readily shreds the visible.”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue. As the years pass, they are censured. Their pleasantry and their piety show cracks, their wit becomes cynicism, their unselfishness hypocrisy; they feel and produce discomfort wherever they go.”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“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, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“In the Weald, autumn approached, breaking up the green monotony of summer,”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“Whether Miss Bartlett detected the slip one cannot say, for it is impossible to penetrate into the minds of elderly people.”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“she reflected that it is impossible to foretell the future with any degree of accuracy, that it is impossible to rehearse life.”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“the ghoulish fashion in which respectable people will nibble after blood.”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“Her feelings were as inflated spiritually as they had been an hour ago esthetically, before she lost Baedeker.”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“No, he is not tactful; yet, 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, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“Well, din-din’s nearly ready,”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“There is nothing particularly classical about a faun: it is only that the Greeks and Italians have ever had the sharpest eyes. You will find him in the “Tempest” and the “Benedicite;” and any country which has beech clumps and sloping grass and very clear streams may reasonably produce him.”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“She was so quick, so clear-headed, so imaginative even. But all the same, she had forgotten what people were like. Finding life dull, she had dropped lies into it, as a chemist drops a new element into a solution, hoping that life would thereby sparkle or turn some beautiful colour.”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“Serious not in the sense of glum; but they must be convinced that our life is a state of some importance, and our earth not a place to beat time on.”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“Have we learnt the true discipline of a bankruptcy if we turn to such coinage as this? Will it really profit us so much if we save our souls and lose the whole world?”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“Even when we love people, we desire to keep some corner secret from them, however small: it is a human right: it is personality”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“Religion was to him a service, a mystic communion with good; not a means of getting what he wanted on the earth.”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“You can’t fight Medusa with anything else. If you ask me what the Spirit of Life is, or to what it is attached, I can’t tell you. I only tell you, watch for it. Myself I’ve found it in books. Some people find it out of doors or in each other. Never mind. It’s the same spirit, and I trust myself to know it anywhere, and to use it rightly.”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“efforts not so much to acquire knowledge as to dispel a little of the darkness by which we and all our acquisitions are surrounded.”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“his whole life was coloured by a contempt of the intellect. That he had a tolerable intellect of his own was not the point: it is in what we value, not in what we have, that the test of us resides.”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“The sense of purity is a puzzling and at times a fearful thing. It seems so noble, and it starts as one with morality. But it is a dangerous guide, and can lead us away not only from what is gracious, but also from what is good.”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“It seems to me that here and there in life we meet with a person or incident that is symbolical. It’s nothing in itself, yet for the moment it stands for some eternal principle. We accept it, at whatever costs, and we have accepted life. But if we are frightened and reject it, the moment, so to speak, passes; the symbol is never offered again.”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works

“It is easy to say shocking things: it is so different to be connected with anything shocking. Life and death were not involved, but comfort and discomfort were.”
― E.M. Forster, The Complete E. M. Forster Collection : 11 Complete Works