The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal. Both assumptions are false: both of them must be accepted as true if we are to go on eating and working and loving, and are to keep open a few breathing holes for the human spirit.

— E. M. Forster

E. M. Forster Quotes

Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.

— E. M. Forster
Courage Short About Life

There’s never any great risk as long as you have money.

— E. M. Forster

He had shown her all the workings of his soul, mistaking this for love.

— E. M. Forster

She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position; it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship.

— E. M. Forster

I think you’re beautiful, the only beautiful person I’ve ever seen. I love your voice and everything to do with you, down to your clothes or the room you are sitting in. I adore you.

— E. M. Forster

He had known so much about her once -what she thought, how she felt, the reasons for her actions. And now he only knew that he loved her, and all the other knowledge seemed passing from him just as he needed it most.

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

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

— E. M. Forster

Men were not gods after all, but as human and as clumsy as girls.

— E. M. Forster

I don’t think literature will be purged until its philosophic pretentiousness is extruded, and I shant live to see that purge, nor perhaps when it has happened will anything survive.

— E. M. Forster

All invitations must proceed from heaven perhaps; perhaps it is futile for men to initiate their own unity, they do but widen the gulfs between them by the attempt.

— E. M. Forster

There’s nothing like a debate to teach one quickness. I often wish I had gone in for them when I was a youngster. It would have helped me no end.

— E. M. Forster

It is now only in letters I write what I feel: not in literature any more, and I seldom say it, because I keep trying to be amusing.

— E. M. Forster

Democracy is not a Beloved Republic really, and never will be. But it is less hateful than other contemporary forms of government, and to that extent deserves our support.

— E. M. Forster

If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious.

— E. M. Forster
About Stories

It is the starved imagination, not the well nourished, that is afraid.

— E. M. Forster

I seem fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or moving it – and I’m sure I can’t tell you whether the fate’s good or evil. I don’t die – I don’t fall in love. And if other people die or fall in love they always do it when I’m just not there.

— E. M. Forster

Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.

— E. M. Forster

Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form.

— E. M. Forster

My conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.

— E. M. Forster
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