E.M. Forster Quotes

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“The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.”

“… there are shadows because there are hills.”

“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.”

“If we act the truth the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run”

“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.”

“A humanist has four leading characteristics — curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.”

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

“While her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to tea”

“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.”

“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.”

“After all, is not a real Hell better than a manufactured Heaven?”

“It's not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.”

“I do like Christmas on the whole…. In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year.”

“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.”

“Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?”

“All a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes - morals, behavior, everything. Absolute trust in someone else is the essence of education.”

“At times our need for a sympathetic gesture is so great that we care not what exactly it signifies or how much we may have to pay for it afterwards.”

“It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted.”

“… though nothing is damaged, everything is changed.”

“I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.”

“One doesn't come to Italy for niceness," was the retort; "one comes for life. Buon giorno! Buon giorno!”

“When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.”

“But it struck him that people are not really dead until they are felt to be dead. As long as there is some misunderstanding about them, they possess a sort of immortality.”

“The crime of suicide lies rather in its disregard for the feelings of those whom we leave behind.”

“Nature pulls one way and human nature another.”

“They had nothing in common but the English language.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Of course he despised the world as a whole; every thoughtful man should; it is almost a test of refinement.”

“Don't be mysterious; there isn't the time.”

“I'd far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.”

“Don't go fighting against the Spring.”

“Though life is very glorious, it is difficult.”

“We move between two darknesses.”

“Sometimes I think too much fuss is made about marriage. Century after century of carnal embracement and we're still no nearer to understanding one another.”

“The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say "yesterday I was happy, today I am not.”

“There has been, is, and always will be every conceivable type of person.”

“Then she lay on her back and gazed at the cloudless sky. Mr. Beebe, whose opinion of her rose daily, whispered to his niece that that was the proper way to behave if any little thing went wrong.”

“Words deserted him immediately. He could only speak when he was not asked to.”

“To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.”

“All men are equal - all men, that is, who possess umbrellas.”

“A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.”

“Excuse my mistakes, realize my limitations. Life is not easy as we know it on the earth.”

“You told me once that we shall be judged by our intentions, not by our accomplishments. I thought it a grand remark. But we must intend to accomplish - not sit intending on a chair.”

“Nothing's the same for anyone. That's why life's this Hell, if you do a thing you're damned, and if you don't you're damned….”

“Because I say so little you think I don't feel. I care a lot.”

“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.”

“I was yours once 'till death if you'd cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now - I can't hang about whining forever - and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness?”

“One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.”