690 Quotes by E. M. Forster

The businessman who assumes that his 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 half-way 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.

Man can learn everything if he will but try.

Excuse my mistakes, realize my limitations. Life is not easy as we know it on the earth.

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

It is fate that I am here,' George persisted, 'but you can call it Italy if it makes you less unhappy.

When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.

...though nothing is damaged, everything is changed.

It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons. It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and, close below, Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road.

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