Quotes by E.M. Forster

It isnt possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. 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.

This desire to govern a woman -- it lies very deep, and men and women must fight it together.... But I do love you surely in a better way then he does. He thought. Yes -- really in a better way. I want you to have your own thoughts even when I hold you in my arms.

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you wont do harm - yes, choose a place where you wont do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.

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

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

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it.

Miss Abbott, dont worry over me. Some people are born not to do things. Im one of them.

Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.

She gave up trying to understand herself, and the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words. The armies are full of pleasant and pious folk. But they have yielded to the only enemy that matters — the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue. As the years pass, they are censured. Their pleasantry and their piety show cracks, their wit becomes cynicism, their unselfishness hypocrisy; they feel and produce discomfort wherever they go.

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

The business man who assumes that this life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth. Yes, I see, dear; its about halfway between, Aunt Juley had hazarded in earlier years. No; truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility

The human mind is not a dignified organ, and I do not see how we can exercise it sincerely except through eclecticism. And the only advice I would offer my fellow eclectics is: Do not be proud of your inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped like this. It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive and truthful.

We reach in desperation beyond the fog, beyond the very stars, the voids of the universe are ransacked to justify the monster, and stamped with a human face. London is religions opportunity--not the decorous religion of theologians, but an anthropomorphic, crude. Yes, the continuous flow would be tolerable if a man of our own sort--not anyone pompous or tearful--were caring for us up in the sky.

While the Gods are powerful, we learn little about them. It is only in their day of decadence that a strong light beats into heaven.

The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say yesterday I was happy, today I am not.

After all, is not a real Hell better than a manufactured Heaven?

He had awoken too late for happiness, but not for strength, and could feel an austere joy, as of a warrior who is homeless but stands fully armed.

They must live outside class, without relations or money; they must work and stick to each other till death. But England belonged to them. That, besides companionship, was their reward. Her air and sky were theirs, not the timorous millions who own stuffy little boxes, but never their own souls.