E. M. Forster Quotes

291 Sourced Quotes

An acquaintance had become a lover, might become a husband, but would retain all that she had noted in the acquaintance; and love must confirm an old relation rather than reveal a new one.

E. M. Forster
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
If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting—both for us and for her.

E. M. Forster
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
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.

E. M. Forster
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.

E. M. Forster
The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink; the nations of today behave to each other worse than they ever did in the past, they cheat, rob, bully and bluff, make war without notice, and kill as many women and children as possible; whereas primitive tribes were at all events restrained by taboos.

E. M. Forster
It's miles worse for you than that; I'm in love with your gamekeeper.

E. M. Forster
Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face.

E. M. Forster
The hungry and the homeless don't care about liberty any more than they care about cultural heritage. To pretend that they do care is cant.

E. M. Forster
This element of surprise or mystery the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called is of great importance in a plot.

E. M. Forster
People in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed.

E. M. Forster
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
Science explained people, but could not understand them. After long centuries among the bones and muscles it might be advancing to knowledge of the nerves, but this would never give understanding

E. M. Forster
Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a great mistake and degenerates into defensiveness or hypocrisy.

E. M. Forster
Just as words have two functions - information and creation - so each human mind has two personalities, one on the surface, one deeper down. The upper personality... is conscious and alert... The lower personality is a... perfect fool, but without it there is no literature...

E. M. Forster
It is the starved imagination, not the well nourished, that is afraid.

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

E. M. Forster
I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.

E. M. Forster
It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why history is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead.

E. M. Forster
But after all, what have we to do with taverns? Real menace belongs to the drawing-room.

E. M. Forster
Italy and London are the only places where I don't feel to exist on sufferance.

E. M. Forster
Sex begins before adolescence, and survives sterility; it is indeed coeval with our lives, although at the mating age its effects are more obvious to Society.

E. M. Forster
In time, Mr Hall, one gets to recognize that sneer, that hardness, for fornication extends far beyond the actual deed. Were it a deed only, I for one would not hold it anathema. But when the nations went a whoring they invariably ended by denying God, I think, and until all sexual irregularities and not some of them are penal the Church will never reconquer England.

E. M. Forster
Democracy is not a Beloved Republic really, and never will be. But it is less hateful than other contemporary forms of government, and to that extent deserves our support.

E. M. Forster
The novelist, unlike many of his colleagues, makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself (roughly: niceties shallcome later), gives them names and sex, assigns them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of inverted commas, and perhaps to behave consistently.

E. M. Forster
School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.

E. M. Forster
Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership.

E. M. Forster
But why I cry out against Rubens is because he painted undressed people instead of naked ones.

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

E. M. Forster