690 Quotes by E. M. Forster

The sky settles everything – not only climates and seasons but when the earth shall be beautiful.

The second dream is more difficult to convey. Nothing happened. He scarcely saw a face, scarcely heard a voice say, “That is your friend,” and then it was over, having filled him with beauty and taught him tenderness. He could die for such a friend, he would allow such a friend to die for him; they would make any sacrifice for each other, and count the world nothing, neither death nor distance nor crossness could part them, because “this is my friend.

The aims of battle and the fruits of conquest are never the same;.

Society is invincible – to a certain degree. But your real life is your own, and nothing can touch it. There is no power on earth that can prevent your criticizing and despising mediocrity – nothing that can stop you retreating into splendour and beauty – into the thoughts and beliefs that make the real life – the real you.

To them Howards End was a house; they could not know that to her it had been a spirit, for which she sought a spiritual heir. And – pushing one step farther in these mists – may they not have decided even better than they supposed? Is it credible that the possessions of the spirit can be bequeathed at all? Has the soul offspring? A wych-elm tree, a vine, a wisp of hay with dew on it – can passion for such things be transmitted where there is no bond of blood?

Helen says it alone endures while men and houses perish, and that in the end the world will be a desert of chairs and sofas – just imagine it! – rolling through infinity with no one to sit upon them.

I am swathed in cant’, she thought, ’and it is good for me to be stripped of it.

So abased, so monotonous is everything that meets the eye, that when the Ganges comes down it might be expected to wash the excrescence back into the soil. Houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but the general outline of the town persists, welling here, shrinking there, like some low but indestructible form of life.

Life is like a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the intrument as you go along.