Edward Morgan Forster OM CH was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist, and librettist. Many of his novels examined class differences and hypocrisy, including A Room with a View, Howards End, and A Passage to India. The last brought him his greatest success. These E M Forster Quotes will motivate you.
Best 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.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “You confuse what’s important with what’s impressive.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “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.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “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.” ~ E. M. Forster
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“How can I know what I think till I see what I say?” ~ E. M. Forster
- “Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.” ~ E. M. Forster
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“The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “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
- “I cannot help thinking that there is something to admire in everyone, even if you do not approve of them.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “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.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “It’s not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “Art for art’s sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden. It is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.” ~ E. M. Forster
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“Unless we remember we cannot understand.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “My conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?” ~ E. M. Forster
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“Nonsense and beauty have close connections.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “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.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “Do not be proud of your inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped like this. It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive and truthful.” ~ 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
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“Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “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.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “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.” ~ E M Forster Quotes
- “Outside the arch, always there seemed another arch. And beyond the remotest echo, a silence.” ~ E. M. Forster
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“One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “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.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “The emotions may be endless. The more we express them, the more we may have to express.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.” ~ E. M. Forster
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“To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “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.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “Books have to be read it is the only way of discovering what they contain.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talks that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence. Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend. There are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim, “I do enjoy myself”, or , “I am horrified,” we are insincere.” ~ E. M. Forster
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“The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “For it is a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “The historian records, but the novelist creates.” ~ 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
- “It was not that ladies were inferior to men; it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself she would be first censured, then despised, and finally ignored.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “At the moment they vanished they were everywhere, the cool benediction of the night descended, the stars sparkled, and the whole universe was a hill.” ~ E. M. Forster
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“When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “This desire to govern a woman — it lies very deep, and men and women must fight it together…. But I do love you surely in a better way then he does.” He thought. “Yes — really in a better way. I want you to have your own thoughts even when I hold you in my arms.” ~ E. M. Forster
- “… there are shadows because there are hills.” ~ E M Forster Quotes
- “While her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to tea” ~ E. M. Forster
- “Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.” ~ E. M. Forster
