E.M. Forster > Quotes

“But this is something new!' said Mrs. Munt, who collected new ideas as a squirrel collects nuts, and was especially attracted by those that are portable.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“What does unhappiness matter when we are all unhappy together?”
― E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

“He had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what they want and what they are; that they puzzle themselves as well as their friends; that their psychology is a modern development, and has not yet been understood.”
― E.M. Forster

“Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes. 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.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“The contest lay not between love and duty. Perhaps there never is such a contest. It lay between the real and the pretended, and Lucy's first aim was to defeat herself.”
― E. M. Forster, A Room with a View

“It is the starved imagination, not the well-nourished, that is afraid.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man's feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong.”
― E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops

“I have no profession. It is another example of my decadence. My attitude - quite an indefensible one - is that so long as I am no trouble to any one I have a right to do as I like. I know I ought to be getting money out of people, or devoting myself to things I don’t care a straw about, but somehow, I’ve not been able to begin.”
“You are quite fortunate, it is quite a wonderful opportunity, the possession of leisure.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“The historian records, but the novelist creates.”
― E.M. Forster

“The business man who assumes that this life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth. "Yes, I see, dear; it's about halfway between," Aunt Juley had hazarded in earlier years. No; truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility”
― E.M. Forester, Howards End

“You have not been yourself all day," said Henry, and rose from his seat with face unmoved. Margaret rushed at him and seized both his hands. She was transfigured.
"Not any more of this!" she cried. "You shall see the connection if it kills you, Henry! You have had a mistress—I forgave you. My sister has a lover—you drive her from the house. Do you see the connection? Stupid, hypocritical, cruel—oh, contemptible!—a man who insults his wife when she's alive and cants with her memory when she's dead. A man who ruins a woman for his pleasure, and casts her off to ruin other men. And gives bad financial advice, and then says he is not responsible. These men are you. You can't recognise them, because you cannot connect. I've had enough of your unneeded kindness. I've spoilt you long enough. All your life you have been spoiled. Mrs. Wilcox spoiled you. No one has ever told what you are—muddled, criminally muddled. Men like you use repentance as a blind, so don't repent. Only say to yourself, 'What Helen has done, I've done.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“Discussion keeps a house alive. It cannot stand by bricks and mortar alone.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art. ”
― E.M. Forster

“He seems to see good in every one. No one would take him for a clergyman.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“The bully and the victim never quite forget their first relations.”
― E.M. Forster, The Longest Journey

“A rebel she was, but not of the kind he understood—a rebel who desired, not a wider dwelling-room, but equality beside the man she loved.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“For the dead, who seem to take away so much, really take with them nothing that is ours.”
― E.M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread

“Pity, if one can generalize, is at the bottom of woman. When men like us, it is for our better qualities, and however tender their liking, we dare not be unworthy of it, or they will quietly let us go. But unworthiness stimulates woman. It brings out her deeper nature, for good or for evil.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“She loved him with too clear a vision to fear his cloudiness”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“It never bored them to hear words, words; they breathed them with the cool night air, never stopping to analyse; the name of the poet, Hafiz, Hali, Iqbal, was sufficient guarantee. India—a hundred Indias—whispered outside beneath the indifferent moon, but for the time India seemed one and their own, and they regained their departed greatness by hearing its departure lamented, they felt young again because reminded that youth must fly.”
― E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

“Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element - direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine - the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution.”
― E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops

“Vashti was seized with the terrors of direct experience. She shrank back into the room, and the wall closed up again.”
― E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops

“A thousand little civilities create tenderness in time.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they contain.”
― E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

“No one confessed the Machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence. The better a man knew his own duties upon it, the less he understood the duties of his neighbor, and in all the world there was not one who understood the monster as a whole. Those master brains had perished.”
― E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops

“And of course she had studied the civilization that had immediately preceded her own - the civilization that had mistaken the functions of the system, and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of for bringing things to people. Those funny old days, when men went for change of air instead of changing the air in their rooms!”
― E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops

“One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions.”
― E.M. Forster

“You are inclined to get muddled, if I may judge from last night. 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, A Room with a View

“He had brought out the man in Alec, and now it was Alec’s turn to bring out the hero in him”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“Don't believe those lies about intellectual people. They're only written to soothe the majority.”
― E. M. Forster, The Longest Journey