690 Quotes by E. M. Forster

The hungry and the homeless don’t care about liberty any more than they care about cultural heritage. To pretend that they do care is cant.

It makes a difference doesn’t it, whether we fully fence ourselves in, or whether we are fenced out by the barriers of others?

The issues Miss Quested had raised were so much more important than she was herself that people inevitably forgot her.

At my age one’s seldom amazed,” he said, smiling. “Marriage is too absurd in any case. It begins and continues for such very slight reasons. The social business props it up on one side, and the theological business on the other, but neither of them are marriage, are they? I’ve friends who can’t remember why they married, no more can their wives. I suspect that it mostly happens haphazard, though afterwards various noble reasons are invented. About marriage I am cynical.

It’s better to be fooled than to be suspicious – that the confidence trick is the work of man, but the want-of-confidence trick is the work of the devil.

My conviction,” says the mystic, “gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it,” and they had agreed that there was something beyond life’s daily grey.

Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time – beautiful?

Italy and London are the only places where I don’t feel to exist on sufferance.

She strove in vain against the echoing walls of their civility.