E. M. Forster Quotes

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

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

Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown

Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return.

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.

I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.

Ideas are fatal to caste.

Pathos, piety, courage, they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.

The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

The idea that nations should love one another, or that business concerns or marketing boards should love one another, or that a man in Portugal should love a man in Peru of whom he has never heard -it is absurd, unreal, dangerous. The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much.

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.

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.

One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.

Outside the arch, always there seemed another arch. And beyond the remotest echo, a silence.

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

Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?

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.

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

You confuse what's important with what's impressive.

Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.

The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance.

How can I know what I think till I see what I say?

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.

Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.

A facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade, every type of dubiousness.

Aziz winked at him slowly and said: “...There are many ways of being a man; mine is to express what is deepest in my heart.

Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.

Human relations are impossible. When they are real they are uncomfortable, and when they are comfortable they are unreal. It was for the journey into solitude that the human soul was created.

My conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.

At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all... My lawgivers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul. My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in the Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is 'Lord, I disbelieve - help thou my unbelief.

It makes a difference doesn't it, whether we fully fence ourselves in, or whether we are fenced out by the barriers of others?

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 being shocked, and attend to your own happiness.

The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken.

Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!

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

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

Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's.

...the true spirit of gastronomic joylessness. Porridge fills the Englishman up, and prunes clear him out.

One's favorite book is as elusive as one's favorite pudding.

Love is always being given where it is not required.

I am so used to seeing the sort of play which deals with one man and two women. They do not leave me with the feeling I have made a full theatrical meal they do not give me the experience of the multiplicity of life.

There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.

I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.