Quotes from E. M. Forster

By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes--a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.

The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

It isn't possible to love and to part.

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.

Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.

Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.

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

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.

Intuition attracts those who wish to be spiritual without any bother, because it promises a heaven where the intuitions of others can be ignored.

All that is observable in a man-that is to say his actions and such of his spiritual existence as can be deduced from his actions-falls into the domain of history.

The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.

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.

Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.

Reverence is fatal to literature.

I never could get on with representative individuals but people who existed on their own account and with whom it might therefore be possible to be friends.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

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

The strong are so stupid.

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.

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.