Quotes from E.M. Forster

Because a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong forever . . . This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilization that won't be a movement, because it will rest on the earth. All the signs are against it now, but I can't help hoping, and very early in the morning in the garden I feel that out house is the future as well as the past.

Nothing's the same for anyone. That's why life's this Hell, if you do a thing you're damned, and if you don't you're damned—

How indeed is it possible for one human being to be sorry for all the sadness that meets him on the face of the earth, for the pain that is endured not only by men, but by animals and plants, and perhaps by the stones? The soul is tired in a moment, and in fear of losing the little she does understand, she retreats to the permanent lines which habit or chance have dictated, and suffers there.

We are conventional people, and conventions — if you will but see it — are majestic in their way, and will claim us in the end. We do not live for great passions or for great memories, or for anything great.

A chance word or a sigh are just as much evidence as a speech or a murder: the life they reveal ceases to be secret and enters the realm of action.

Were they normal? What a question to ask! And it is always those who know nothing about human nature, who are bored by psychology and shocked by physiology, who ask it.

No one, except Ronny, had any idea of what passed in her mind, and he only dimly, for where there is officialism every human relationship suffers.

The idealism and the brutality that ran through boyhood had joined at last, and twined into love. No one might want such love, but he could not feel ashamed of it, because it was "he", neither body or soul, nor body or soul, but "he" working through both.

Like his sister and like most young people, he was naturally attracted by the idea of equality, and the undeniable fact that there are different kinds of Emersons annoyed him beyond measure.

A man does not talk to himself quite truly — not even to himself: the happiness or misery that he secretly feels proceeds from causes that he cannot quite explain, because as soon as he raises them to the level of the explicable they lose their native quality.

Kindness, more kindness, and even after that more kindness. I assure you it is the only hope.

I do not consider her choice of a piece happy. Beethoven is so usually simple and direct in his appeal that it is sheer perversity to choose a thing like that, which, if anything, disturbs.

The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.

Now it is all dark. Now Beauty and Passion seem never to have existed. I know. But remember the mountains over Florence and the view...

Round every knob and cushion in the house sentiment gathered, a sentiment that was at times personal, but more often a faint piety to the dead, a prolongation of rites that might have ended at the grave.

Love is the best, and the more she let herself love him, the more chance was there that he would set his soul in order.

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

You remember how he would trust strangers, and if they fooled him he would say: 'It's better to be fooled than to be suspicious'—that the confidence trick is the work of man, but the want-of-confidence trick is the work of the devil.

Appearing thus late in the story, Cecil must be at once described. He was medieval. Like a Gothic statue.

Her air and sky were theirs, not the timorous millions' who own stuffy little boxes, but never their own souls.

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.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk.

Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead nowhere.

You can't build a house on the sand, and passion's sand. We want bed rock …