E. M. Forster Quotes

291 Sourced Quotes

It is so difficult – at least, I find it difficult – to understand people who speak the truth.

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

E. M. Forster
I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

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

E. M. Forster
He was passionately in love with her; therefore she could do exactly as she liked. 'It mayn't be heaven below,' she thought, 'but it's better than Charles.'

E. M. Forster
He was obliged however to throw over Christianity. Those who base their conduct upon what they are rather than upon what they ought to be, always must throw it over in the end....

E. M. Forster
I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.

E. M. Forster
There has been, is, and always will be every conceivable type of person.

E. M. Forster
Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darknesses.

E. M. Forster
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.

E. M. Forster
I think - I think - I think how little they think what lies so near them.

E. M. Forster
But the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable.

E. M. Forster
I went to our Theological College lately, Westcott House, and we had a sort of chat. He told me that without him it was impossible to understand the universe, and I came away having forgotten to reply that it did not occur to me to try to understand the universe. I must not run on like this so. Or rather what I mean is I have just finished the biography of my great aunt. Undersanding, or partially understanding, her has been quite a large enough job.

E. M. Forster
The Valkyries are symbols not only of courage but of intelligence; they represent the human spirit snatching its opportunity while the going is good, and one of them even finds time to love. Bruennhilde's last song hymns the recurrence of love, and since it is the privilege of art to exaggerate she goes even further, and proclaims the love which is eternally triumphant, and feeds upon freedom and lives.

E. M. Forster
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.

E. M. Forster
'Why are pictures like this allowed?' he suddenly cried. He had stopped in front of a colonial print in which the martyrdom of St Agatha was depicted with all the fervour that incompetence could command.
'It's only a saint,' said Lady Peaslake, placidly raising her head.
'How disgusting – and how ugly'
'Yes, very. It's Roman Catholic.'

E. M. Forster
Always fatuity, vulgarity, as soon as human passion is touched. [...] Just as some poetry is of the eye (form, colour) and some of the ear, so Keats is of the palate. Not only has he constant reference to its pleasures, but the general sensation after reading him is one of tasting. 'What's the harm?' Well, taste for some reason or the other can't carry one far into the world of beauty—that reason being perhaps that though you don't want comradership there you do want the possibility of comradership, and A cannot swallow B's mouthful by any possibility:.... and this exclusiveness (to maunder on) also attaches to the physical side of sex though not the least to the spiritual.

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

E. M. Forster
I am the means and not the end. I am the food and not the life. Stand by yourself, as that boy has stood. I cannot save you. For poetry is a spirit; and they that would worship it must worship in spirit and in truth.

E. M. Forster
It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.

E. M. Forster
Ecstasy cannot last, but can carve a channel for something lasting.

E. M. Forster
Men were not gods after all, but as human and as clumsy as girls.

E. M. Forster
The newspapers still talk about glory but the average man, thank God, has got rid of that illusion. It is a damned bore, with a stall mate as the most probable outcome, but one has to see it through, and see it through with the knowledge that whichever side wins, civilisation in Europe will be pipped for the next 30 years. Don't indulge in Romance here, Malcolm, or suppose that an era of jolly little nationalities is dawning. We shall be much too much occupied with pestilence and poverty to reconstruct.

E. M. Forster
Suspense: the only literary tool that has any effect upon tyrants and savages.

E. M. Forster
What about the creative state? In it a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences, and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.

E. M. Forster
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
Dead silence ensued, which was well enough for Ansell, to whom it merely meant that neither of us had any more to say. But to educated people silence matters; it is a token of stupidity and lack of invention.

E. M. Forster
The traveller who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women under it.

E. M. Forster
This conversation taught me that some of us can meet reality on this side of the grave. I do not envy them. Such adventures may profit the disembodied soul, but as long as I have flesh and blood I pray that my grossness preserve me. Our lower nature has its dreams. Mine is of a certain farm, windy but fruitful, half-way between the deserted moorland and the uninhabitable sea. Hither, at rare intervals, she should descend and he ascend, to shatter their spiritual communion by one caress.

E. M. Forster
Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.

E. M. Forster