E M Forster Love Quotes & Sayings

He lived to near the things he loved to seem poetical. — E. M. Forster

We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us love one another, and work and rejoice. I don't believe in this world sorrow. — E. M. Forster

Standing each by his monster, they looked at each other, and smiled — E. M. Forster

I knew you read the Symposium in the vac," he said in a low voice.
Maurice felt uneasy.
"Then you understand - without me saying more - "
"How do you mean?"
Durham could not wait. People were all around them, but with eyes that had gone intensely blue he whispered, "I love you. — E. M. Forster

You want to love everyone equally, and that's worse than impossible
it's wrong. — E. M. Forster

Whom does Love concern beyond the beloved and the lover? Yet his impact deluges a hundred shores. — E. M. Forster

God is not Love in the East. He is Power, although Mercy may temper it. — E. M. Forster

Remember that it's only by going off the track that you get to know the country...And don't, let me beg you, go with that awful tourist idea that Italy's only a museum of antiquities and art. Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvelous than the land. — E. M. Forster

He never even thought of tenderness and emotion; his considerations about Durham remained cold. Durham didn't dislike him, he was sure. That was all he wanted. One thing at a time. He didn't so much as have hopes, for hope distracts, and he had a great deal to see to. — E. M. Forster

The contest lay not between love and duty. Perhaps there never is such a contest. It lay between the real and the pretended, and Lucy's first aim was to defeat herself. — E. M. Forster

Why children?' he asked. 'Why always children? For love to end where it begins is far more beautiful, and Nature knows it. — E. M. Forster

The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death. — E. M. Forster

God has put us on earth to love our neighbors and to show it, and He is omnipresent, even in India, to see how we are succeeding. — E. M. Forster

When love flies it is remembered not as love but as something else. Blessed are the uneducated, who forget it entirely, and are never conscious of folly or pruriency in the past, of long aimless conversations. — E. M. Forster

Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work. — E. M. Forster

You do care a little for me, I know ... but nothing to speak of, and you don't love me. I was yours once till death if you'd cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now ... and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness. — E. M. Forster

If we lived for ever, what you say would be true. But we have to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived for ever. As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is coming. I love death - not morbidly, but because He explains. He shows me the emptiness of Money. Death and Money are the eternal foes. Not Death and Life. . . . Death destroys a man: the idea of Death saves him. Behind the coffins and the skeletons that stay the vulgar mind lies something so immense that all that is great in us responds to it. Men of the world may recoil from the charnel-house that they will one day enter, but Love knows better. Death is his foe, but his peer, and in their age-long struggle the thews of Love have been strengthened, and his vision cleared, until there is no one who can stand against him. — E. M. Forster

It is only that people are far more different than is pretended. All over the world men and women are worrying because they cannot develop as they are supposed to develop. Here and there they have the matter out, and it comforts them. Don't fret yourself, Helen. Develop what you have; love your child. I do not love children. I am thankful to have none. I can play with their beauty and charm, but that is all - nothing real, not one scrap of what there ought to be. And others - others go farther still, and move outside humanity altogether. A place, as well as a person, may catch the glow. Don't you see that all this leads to comfort in the end? It is part of the battle against sameness. Differences - eternal differences, planted by God in a single family, so that there may always be colour; sorrow, perhaps, but colour in the daily grey. — E. M. Forster

He educated Maurice, or rather his spirit educated Maurice's spirit, for they themselves became equal. Neither thought "Am I led; am I leading?" Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection. — E. M. Forster

The idea that nations should love one another, or that business concerns or marketing boards should love one another, or that a man in Portugal should love a man in Peru of whom he has never heard -it is absurd, unreal, dangerous. The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. — E. M. Forster

I only know what it is that's wrong with him; not why it is."
And what is it?" asked Lucy fearfully, expecting some harrowing tale.
The old trouble; things won't fit."
What things?"
The things of the universe. It's quite true. They don't."
Oh Mr. Emerson, whatever do you mean?"
In his ordinary voice, so that she scarcely realized he was quoting poetry, he said:

"'From far, from eve and morning,
And yon twelve-winded sky,
The stuff of life to knit me
Blew hither: here am I."

George and I both know this, but why does it distress him? We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all of life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice. I don't believe in this world of sorrow. — E. M. Forster

It isn't possible to love and to part. — E. M. Forster

You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. — E. M. Forster

Man has to pick up the use of his functions as he goes along- especially the function of Love. — E. M. Forster

A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood. — E. M. Forster

Love and Truth, their warfare seems eternal. — E. M. Forster

Love is always being given where it is not required. — 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 ... — E. M. Forster

... I since cricket match do long to talk with one of my arms around you, then place both arms round you and share with you, the above now seems sweeter to me than words can say. — E. M. Forster

... And now we shan't be parted no more, and that's finished. — E. M. Forster

Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand. — E. M. Forster

Perhaps it was Helen's way of falling in love--a curious way to Margaret, whose agony and whose contempt of Henry were yet imprinted with his image. Helen forgot people. They were husks that had enclosed her emotion. — E. M. Forster

He was not sure, but liked it. It recurred when they met suddenly or had been silent. It beckoned to him across intellect, saying, "This is all very well, you're clever, we know - but come!" It haunted him so that he watched for it while his brain and tongue were busy, and when it came he felt himself replying, "I'll come - I didn't know."
"You can't help yourself now. You must come."
"I don't want to help myself."
"Come then."
He did come. He flung down all the barriers - not at once, for he did not live in a house that can be destroyed in a day. — E. M. Forster

Perhaps anything that he did would have pleased Lucy, but his awkwardness went straight to her heart. — E. M. Forster

Tolerance is just a makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends. — E. M. Forster

For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and - by some sad, strange irony - it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy. — E. M. Forster

Tolerance is a very dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is negative. It merely means putting up with people, being able to stand things. — E. M. Forster

When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made. — E. M. Forster

He had shown her all the workings of his soul, mistaking this for love. — E. M. Forster

The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance. — E. M. Forster

Petty unselfishness," she repeated. "I had got an idea that every one here spent their lives in making little sacrifices for objects they didn't care for, to please people they didn't love; that they never learnt to be sincere - and, what's as bad, never learnt how to enjoy themselves. — E. M. Forster

If we act the truth the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run — E. M. Forster

Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives in the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It was robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops - but not on our lies. The Machine proceeds - but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die. — E. M. Forster

It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal. — E. M. Forster

Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love. — E. M. Forster

I think you're beautiful, the only beautiful person I've ever seen. I love your voice and everything to do with you, down to your clothes or the room you are sitting in. I adore you. — E. M. Forster

They must live outside class, without relations or money; they must work and stick to each other till death. But England belonged to them. That, besides companionship, was their reward. Her air and sky were theirs, not the timorous millions' who own stuffy little boxes, but never their own souls. — E. M. Forster

She must be assured that it is not a criminal offense to love at first sight. — E. M. Forster

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom. — E. M. Forster

It's miles worse for you than that; I'm in love with your gamekeeper. — E. M. Forster

An acquaintance had become a lover, might become a husband, but would retain all that she had noted in the acquaintance; and love must confirm an old relation rather than reveal a new one. — E. M. Forster

After all, is not a real Hell better than a manufactured Heaven? — E. M. Forster

I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows. — E. M. Forster

And the triviality faded from their faces, though it left something behind -- the knowledge that they could never be parted because their love was rooted in common things. — E. M. Forster

She only felt that the candle would burn better, the packing go easier, the world be happier, if she could give and receive some human love. — E. M. Forster

I have, however, to live in an age of Faith - the sort of thing I used to hear praised and recommended when I was a boy. It is damned unpleasant, really. It is bloody in every sense of the word. And I have to keep my end up in it. Where do I start?

With personal relationships. Here is something comparatively solid in a world full of violence and cruelty. Not absolutely solid... We don't know what other people are like. How then can we put any trust in personal relationships, or cling to them in the gathering political storm? In theory we can't. But in practice we can and do. Though A is unchangeably A or B unchangeably B, there can still be love and loyalty between the two. For the purpose of loving one has to assume that the personality is solid, and the "self" is an entity, and to ignore all contrary evidence. And since to ignore evidence is one of the characteristics of faith, I certainly can proclaim that I believe in personal relationships. — E. M. Forster

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. — E. M. Forster

Love felt and returned, love which our bodies exact and our hearts have transfigured, love which is the most real thing that we shall ever meet, reappeared now as the world's enemy, and she must stifle it. — E. M. Forster

I only wish the poets would say this too: love is of the body; not the body, but of the the body. Ah! the misery that would be saved if we confessed that! Ah! for a little directness to liberate the soul! — E. M. Forster

Like many other who have lived long in a great capital, she had strong feelings about the various railway termini. They are our gates to the glorious and unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return. In Paddington all Cornwall is latent and the remoter west; down the inclines of Liverpool Street lie fenlands and the illimitable Broads; Scotland is through the pylons of Euston; Wessex behind the poised chaos of Waterloo. Italians realize this, as is natural; those of them who are so unfortunate as to serve as waiters in Berlin call the Anhalt Bahnhof the Stazione d'Italia, because by it they must return to their homes. And he is a chilly Londoner who does not endow his stations with some personality, and extend to them, however shyly, the emotions of fear and love. — E. M. Forster

... and someone he scarcely knew moved towards him and knelt beside him and whispered, 'Sir, was you calling out for me? ... Sir, I know ... I know,' and touched him. — E. M. Forster

Love is of no value in a witness, as a barrister ought to know — E. M. Forster

Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another. — E. M. Forster

Lucy was suffering from the most grievous wrong which this world has yet discovered: diplomatic advantage had been taken of her sincerity, of her craving for sympathy and love. Such a wrong is not easily forgotten. Never again did she expose herself without due consideration and precaution against rebuff. And such a wrong may react disastrously upon the soul. — E. M. Forster

Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer — E. M. Forster

She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die. — E. M. Forster

I seem fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or moving it - and I'm sure I can't tell you whether the fate's good or evil. I don't die - I don't fall in love. And if other people die or fall in love they always do it when I'm just not there. — E. M. Forster

This desire to govern a woman
it lies very deep, and men and women must fight it together ... But I do love you surely in a better way then he does." He thought. "Yes
really in a better way. I want you to have your own thoughts even when I hold you in my arms. — E. M. Forster

Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land. — E. M. Forster

There is a scene in it. The hero and heroine make love. Do you know about that? — E. M. Forster

Love was an emotion through which you occasionally enjoyed yourself. It could not do things. — E. M. Forster