Quotes from E. M. Forster

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

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

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.

No one is India.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.

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

All a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes — morals, behaviour, everything. Absolute trust in some one else is the essence of education.

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

Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.

You want to love everyone equally, and that's worse than impossible--it's wrong.

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.

If we act the truth the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run

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

Those who search for truth are too conscious of the maze to be hard on others...

Truth is a flower in whose neighbourhood others must wither.

At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes.

Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.

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.

Why children?' he asked. 'Why always children? For love to end where it begins is far more beautiful, and Nature knows it.

God is not Love in the East. He is Power, although Mercy may temper it.

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

She only felt that the candle would burn better, the packing go easier, the world be happier, if she could give and receive some human love.