690 Quotes by E. M. Forster

Life’s very difficult and full of surprises. At all events, I’ve got as far as that. To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged – well, one can’t do all these things at once, worse luck, because they’re so contradictory. It’s then that proportion comes in – to live by proportion. Don’t begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed...

All men are my brothers and as soon as one behaves as such he may see my wife.

A thousand little civilities create tenderness in time.

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.

She disliked confidences, for they might lead to self-knowledge and to that king of terrors – Light.

I have always found writing pleasant and don’t understand what people mean by ‘throes of creation.’

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

All a child’s life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes – morals, behavior, everything. Absolute trust in someone else is the essence of education.

She was no longer examining life, but being examined by it; she had become a real person.