E.M. Forster Quotes

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

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

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

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.

They had nothing in common but the English language.

Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.

Tolerance is a very dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is negative. It merely means putting up with people, being able to stand things.

I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man's pleasure when they come a cropper.

When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else.

For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.

I am certainly an ought and not a must.

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.

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.

I write in the morning, I walk in the afternoon and I read in the evening. It's a very easy, lovely life.

Human beings have their great chance in the novel.

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

Then she lay on her back and gazed at the cloudless sky. Mr. Beebe, whose opinion of her rose daily, whispered to his niece that that was the proper way to behave if any little thing went wrong.

While her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to tea

Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time - beautiful?

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

What the world most needs today are negative virtues - not minding people, not being huffy, touchy, irritable or revengeful.

One of the main reasons I wanted to work on 'World War Z' was because I'm a huge fan of the book, and I love the idea of taking a non-linear story and creating a three-act structure out of it.

America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large.

Reformers who are obsessed with purity and cannot see that their obsession is impure.

They cared for no one, they were outside humanity, and death, had it come, would only have continued their pursuit of a retreating horizon.

I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.

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 . . . .

Of course he despised the world as a whole; every thoughtful man should; it is almost a test of refinement.

Lord I disbelieve - help thou my unbelief.

Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.

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.

I absolutely adored Wuthering Heights and fell in love with Heathcliff as most girls do.

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

I don't think literature will be purged until its philosophic pretentiousness is extruded, and I shant live to see that purge, nor perhaps when it has happened will anything survive.

Don't go fighting against the Spring.

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.

Three days after my brother died, my father was in the hospital. He just did not want to live anymore. Before, he was fighting and loving life.

Their quarrel was no more surprising than are most quarrels — inevitable at the time, incredible afterwards.

She must be assured that it is not a criminal offense to love at first sight.

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

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

The crime of suicide lies rather in its disregard for the feelings of those whom we leave behind.

To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected.

It is now only in letters I write what I feel: not in literature any more, and I seldom say it, because I keep trying to be amusing.

Roger Fry is painting me. It is too like me at present, but he is confident he will be able to alter that. Post-Impressionism is at present confined to my lower lip... and to my chin.

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.

One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions.

Excuse my mistakes, realize my limitations. Life is not easy as we know it on the earth.