E. M. Forster People Quotations

Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.

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.

I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I'd like to be.

The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power.

What the world most needs today are negative virtues - not minding people, not being huffy, touchy, irritable or revengeful.

But why I cry out against Rubens is because he painted undressed people instead of naked ones.

I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.

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...

I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.

But it struck him that people are not really dead until they are felt to be dead. As long as there is some misunderstanding about them, they possess a sort of immortality.

It's not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.

It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted.

To trust people is a luxury in which only the wealthy can indulge; the poor cannot afford it.

I'd far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.

I never could get on with representative individuals but people who existed on their own account and with whom it might therefore be possible to be friends.

It is so difficult - at least, I find it difficult - to understand people who speak the truth.

Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.

Self-pity ? I see no moral objections to it, the smell drives people away, but that's a practical objection, and occasionally an advantage.

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

I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.

People in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed.

In the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life.

Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when people are inquisitive they nearly always have bad memories and are usually stupid at bottom.

People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.

Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.

If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people - a very few people, but a few novelists are among them - are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest in against such a search: organized religion, the State, the family in its economic aspect, have nothing to gain, and it is only when outward prohibitions weaken that it can proceed: history conditions it to that extent.

If we act the truth the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run

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

Don't believe those lies about intellectual people. They're only written to soothe the majority.

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.

I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.