Top 100 E. M. Forster Quotes
#1. No one is more triumphant than the man who chooses a worthy subject and masters all its facts.
E. M. Forster
#2. The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say yesterday I was happy, today I am not.
E. M. Forster
#3. He had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what they want and what they are; that they puzzle themselves as well as their friends; that their psychology is a modern development, and has not yet been understood.
E. M. Forster
#4. There has been, is, and always will be every conceivable type of person.
E. M. Forster
#6. If a man cannot lead up to passion, he can at all events lead down from it
E. M. Forster
#7. I only wish the poets would say this too: love is of the body; not the body, but of the the body. Ah! the misery that would be saved if we confessed that! Ah! for a little directness to liberate the soul!
E. M. Forster
#8. I swear from the bottom of my heart I want to be healed. I want to be like other men, not this outcast whom nobody wants.
E. M. Forster
#9. Ulysses ... is a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell.
E. M. Forster
#10. He never retorted that the artist is not a bricklayer at all, but a horseman whose business it is to catch Pegasus at once, not to practise for him by mounting tamer colts. This is hard, hot and generally ungraceful work, but it is not drudgery. For drudgery is not art, and cannot lead to it.
E. M. Forster
#11. i never knew anyone so relentless to his ancestors - you make up for your soapiness toward the living
E. M. Forster
#12. She failed - visions do not come when we try, though they may come through trying. But
E. M. Forster
#14. We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.
E. M. Forster
#15. Italy and London are the only places where I don't feel to exist on sufferance.
E. M. Forster
#16. Love is of no value in a witness, as a barrister ought to know
E. M. Forster
#18. He had shown her all the workings of his soul, mistaking this for love.
E. M. Forster
#19. I've swallowed a pollywog. It wriggleth in my tummy. I shall die - Emerson
E. M. Forster
#20. The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.
E. M. Forster
#21. This is Ahab, that's Jezebel," said Evie, who was one of those who name animals after the less successful characters of Old Testament history.
E. M. Forster
#22. Don't brood too much," she wrote to Helen, "on the superiority of the unseen to the seen. It's true, but to brood on it is medieval. Our business is not to contrast the two, but to reconcile them.
E. M. Forster
#23. The issues Miss Quested had raised were so much more important than she was herself that people inevitably forgot her.
E. M. Forster
#24. Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.
E. M. Forster
#25. I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.
E. M. Forster
#26. Men were not gods after all, but as human and as clumsy as girls.
E. M. Forster
#28. 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
#29. As for her hair, or rather hairs, they are too complicated to describe, but one system went down her back, lying in a thick pad there, while another, created for a lighter destiny, rippled around her forehead.
E. M. Forster
#30. There are different ways of evil and I prefer mine to yours.
E. M. Forster
#31. She walked about disdainfully, unwilling to be enthusiastic over monuments of uncertain authorship or date.
E. M. Forster
#32. Italy. It may be full of beautiful pictures and churches, but we cannot judge a country by anything but its
men.
E. M. Forster
#33. It was unbearable, and he thought again, 'How unhappy I am!' and became happier.
E. M. Forster
#34. A novel is based on evidence, + or -x, the unknown quantity being the temperament of the novelist, and the unknown quantity always modifies the effect of the evidence, and sometimes transforms it entirely.
E. M. Forster
#35. Things that are indelicate can sometimes be beautiful.
E. M. Forster
#36. No disease of the imagination is so difficult to cure, as that which is complicated with the dread of guilt : fancy and conscience then act interchangeably upon us, and so often shift their places, that the illusions of one are not distinguished from the dictates of the other.
E. M. Forster
#37. Neither memory nor anticipation is much interested in Father Time, and all dreamers, artists and lovers are partially delivered from his tyranny;
E. M. Forster
#38. How few writers can prostitute all their powers!
E. M. Forster
#39. As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take this examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one would be a penny the stupider.
E. M. Forster
#40. I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper.
E. M. Forster
#41. How do I know what I have to say wntil I see what I have said?
E. M. Forster
#42. She grew more and more vexed with his dignified behavior. By a cruel irony, she was drawing out what was best in his disposition.
E. M. Forster
#43. We shan't have rain, but we shall have darkness, so let us hurry on. The darkness last night was appalling.
E. M. Forster
#44. She watched the moon, whose radiance stained with primrose the purple of the surrounding sky. In England the moon had seemed dead and alien; here she was caught in the shawl of night together with earth and all the other stars.
E. M. Forster
#45. Human beings have their great chance in the novel.
E. M. Forster
#46. We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.
E. M. Forster
#47. 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
#49. Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.
E. M. Forster
#50. I was hoping that he was nice; I do so always hope that people will be nice.
E. M. Forster
#51. Discussion keeps a house alive. It cannot stand by bricks and mortar alone.
E. M. Forster
#52. It is easy to sympathize at a distance,' said an old gentleman with a beard. 'I value more the kind word that is spoken close to my ear.
E. M. Forster
#53. I don't intend him, or any man or any woman, to be all my life - good heavens, no! There are heaps of things in me that he doesn't, and shall never, understand.
E. M. Forster
#54. 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
#55. Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's.
E. M. Forster
#56. Italy was offering her the most priceless of all possessions - her own soul.
E. M. Forster
#57. He did not know, but presently he would know. Great is information, and she shall prevail.
E. M. Forster
#58. Everything must be like something, so what is this ike?
E. M. Forster
#59. 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
#60. She was as bored as her brother would have been, and had not his gift of listening beneath words.
E. M. Forster
#61. Science, when applied to personal relationships, is always just wrong .
E. M. Forster
#62. To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.
E. M. Forster
#63. One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister.
E. M. Forster
#64. In time his slender personality faded, the scene that he had evoked endured. In all the variable years that followed she never saw the like of it again.
E. M. Forster
#65. 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
#66. England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.
E. M. Forster
#67. The past is devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards.
E. M. Forster
#68. Love felt and returned, love which our bodies exact and our hearts have transfigured, love which is the most real thing that we shall ever meet, reappeared now as the world's enemy, and she must stifle it.
E. M. Forster
#69. He had dulled his craving for verbal truth and cared chiefly for truth of mood.
E. M. Forster
#70. Never mind what lies behind Death, Mr. Bast, but be sure that the poet and the musician and the tramp will be happier in it than the man who has never learnt to say, 'I am I.
E. M. Forster
#73. At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
E. M. Forster
#75. an Italian can never be ignored, least of all when he has a grievance.
E. M. Forster
#77. Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.
E. M. Forster
#78. Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.
E. M. Forster
#79. 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
#80. You can when you mean to,' said Maurice gently. 'You can do anything once you know what it is.
E. M. Forster
#81. Perhaps it was Helen's way of falling in love--a curious way to Margaret, whose agony and whose contempt of Henry were yet imprinted with his image. Helen forgot people. They were husks that had enclosed her emotion.
E. M. Forster
#82. A friendliness, as of dwarfs shaking hands, was in the air...
E. M. Forster
#83. Books have to be read it is the only way of discovering what they contain.
E. M. Forster
#84. Miss Abbott, don't worry over me. Some people are born not to do things. I'm one of them.
E. M. Forster
#85. 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
#86. God has put us on earth to love our neighbors and to show it, and He is omnipresent, even in India, to see how we are succeeding.
E. M. Forster
#87. But it is sometimes as difficult to lose one's temper as it is difficult at other times to keep it.
E. M. Forster
#88. One can tip too much as well as too little, indeed the coin that buys the exact truth has not yet been minted.
E. M. Forster
#89. Belfastas uncivilised as ever
savage black mothers in houses of dark red brick, friendly manufacturers too drunk to entertain you when you arrive. It amuses me till I get tired.
E. M. Forster
#90. He questioned Maurice, who, when he grasped the point, was understood to reply that deeds are more important than words.
E. M. Forster
#91. Maurice hated cricket. It demanded a snickety neatness he could not supply.
E. M. Forster
#92. I will take you by a dear dirty back way, Miss Honeychurch, and if you bring me luck, we shall have an adventure.
E. M. Forster
#93. Intuition attracts those who wish to be spiritual without any bother, because it promises a heaven where the intuitions of others can be ignored.
E. M. Forster
#94. To attribute these two great developments to the Central Committee, is to take a very narrow view of civilization. The Central Committee announced the developments, it is true, but they were no more the cause of them than were the kings of the imperialistic period the cause of war.
E. M. Forster
#95. Do they care about Literature and Art? That is the most important when you come to think of it. Literature and Art. Most important.
E. M. Forster
#96. Like every true performer, she was intoxicated by the mere feel of the notes: they were fingers caressing her own; and by touch, not by sound alone, did she come to her desire.
E. M. Forster
#97. If you introduce the human figure you at once arouse either disgust or desire.
E. M. Forster
#98. The world, he believed, is a globe of men who are trying to reach one another and can best do so by the help of goodwill plus culture and intelligence.
E. M. Forster
#99. One grows accustomed to being praised, or being blamed, or being advised, but it is unusual to be understood.
E. M. Forster
#100. For you cannot have gentility without paying for it.
E. M. Forster
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