Top 15 E. M. Forster Quotes

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.

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

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

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.

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.

Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.

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

I am an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.

"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 than 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."

You confuse what's important with what's impressive.

You do care a little for me, I know... but nothing to speak of, and you don't love me. I was yours once till death if you'd cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now... and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness.

Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.

Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.