690 Quotes by E. M. Forster

The past is devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards.

Italy is such a delightful place to live in if you happen to be a man. There one may enjoy that exquisite luxury of Socialism – that true Socialism which is based not on equality of income or character, but on the equality of manners.

She was like a woman of Leonardo Da Vinci’s, whom we love not so much for herself as for the things that she will not tell us.

No one confessed the Machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence. The better a man knew his own duties upon it, the less he understood the duties of his neighbor, and in all the world there was not one who understood the monster as a whole. Those master brains had perished.

I think – I think – I think how little they think what lies so near them.

He supposed her ‘as clever as they make ‘em’, but no more, not realizing that she was penetrating to the depths of his soul, and approving of what she found there.

Silence and loneliness cannot last for ever. It may be a hundred or a thousand years, but the sea lasts longer, and she shall come out of it and sing.

Are Indians cowards? No, but they are bad starters and occasionally jib. Fear is everywhere; the British Raj rests on it.

They were his last words, because Maurice had disappeared thereabouts, leaving no trace of his presence except a little pile of the petals of the evening primrose, which mourned from the ground like an expiring fire. To the end of his life Clive was not sure of the exact moment of departure, and with the approach of old age he grew uncertain whether the moment had yet occurred.