Top 398 Quotes & Sayings by E. M. Forster - Page 2

Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.

We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.

Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.

The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.

I never could get on with representative individuals but people who existed on their own account and with whom it might therefore be possible to be friends.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

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.

Reverence is fatal to literature.

There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such expense to themselves.

Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.

The woman who can't influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself.

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.

No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.

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

If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.

People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.

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

The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.

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.

Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; vulgarity, concealing something.

The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.

The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.

Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.

Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.

Though life is very glorious, it is difficult.

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.

Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.

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 confuse what's important with what's impressive.

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.

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

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

... there are shadows because there are hills.

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.

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

There's never any great risk as long as you have money.

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world.

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

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

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

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

Books have to be read it is the only way of discovering what they contain.

You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.

Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.

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

Money pads the edges of things.

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.

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.

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

I can only do what's easy. I can only entice and be enticed. I can't, and won't, attempt difficult relations. If I marry it will either be a man who's strong enough to boss me or whom I'm strong enough to boss. So I shan't ever marry, for there aren't such men. And Heaven help any one whom I do marry, for I shall certainly run away from him before you can say 'Jack Robinson.

The emotions may be endless. The more we express them, the more we may have to express.

Adventures do occur, but not punctually.

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

One grows accustomed to being praised, or being blamed, or being advised, but it is unusual to be understood.

Give, do not lend; after death who will thank you?

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