Quotes from E.M. Forster

No, he is not tactful, yet have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet, at the same time, beautiful?

Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?

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

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom.

There's enough sorrow in the world, isn't there, without trying to invent it.

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.

A humanist has four leading characteristics - curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.

Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West.

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

One doesn't come to Italy for niceness," was the retort; "one comes for life. Buon giorno! Buon giorno!

At times our need for a sympathetic gesture is so great that we care not what exactly it signifies or how much we may have to pay for it afterwards.

The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.

I should have gone through life half awake if you'd had the decency to leave me alone. Awake intellectually, yes, and emotionally in a way; but here--" He pointed with his pipe stem to his heart; and both smiled. "Perhaps we woke up one another. I like to think that anyway.

Don't go fighting against the Spring.

I was yours once 'till death if you'd cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now - I can't hang about whining forever - and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness?

I do like Christmas on the whole.... In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year.

She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.

There has been, is, and always will be every conceivable type of person.  

But it struck him that people are not really dead until they are felt to be dead. As long as there is some misunderstanding about them, they possess a sort of immortality.

though nothing is damaged, everything is changed.

A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man.

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

I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.

Don't be mysterious; there isn't the time.