E.M. Forster Quotes - Page 4

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; it's 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
E.M. Forster
It is so difficult - at least, I find it difficult - to understand people who speak the truth.
E.M. Forster
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.
E.M. Forster
Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him.
E.M. Forster
Miss Abbott, don't worry over me. Some people are born not to do things. I'm one of them.
E.M. Forster
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.
E.M. Forster
If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
E.M. Forster
Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
E.M. Forster
Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.
E.M. Forster
The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
E.M. Forster
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 won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.
E.M. Forster
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.
E.M. Forster
It isn't 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.
E.M. Forster