E. M. Forster Quotes

Reflect often upon the rapidity with which all existing things, or things coming into existence, sweep past us and are carried away.

Time is a river rolling into nowhere. We must live while we can, and we'll drink our cup of laughter.

Today is not forever.

Life really is very brief.

Life is a fragment, a moment between two eternities.

Time stays, we go.

Time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart.

Life is but a moment, death also is but another.

Infancy is what is eternal, and the rest, all the rest, is brevity, extreme brevity.

Time is long but life is short.

We're all just passing time and occupy our chair very briefly.

Time moves on for everyone.

The brief span of our poor unhappy life to its final hour Is hastening on; and while we drink and call for gay wreaths, Perfumes, and young girls, old age creeps upon us, unperceived.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting.

Look round and round upon this bare bleak plain, and see even here, upon a winter's day, how beautiful the shadows are! Alas! It is the nature of their kind to be so. The loveliest things in life... are but shadows; and they come and go, and change and fade away, as rapidly as these.

Today will die tomorrow.

Life is just a moment of time and it pass by

Lives are mere blips on the canvas of eternity.

If time and space, as sages say, Are things which cannot be, The sun which does not feel decay No greater is than we. So why, Love, should we ever pray To live a century? The butterfly that lives a day Has lived eternity.

Nothing endures except change; nothing is constant except death. Every heartbeat wounds us, and life would be an eternal bleeding to death, were it not for literature. It grants us what nature does not: a golden time that doesn't rust, a springtime that never wilts, cloudless happiness and eternal youth. [my translation]

I would have stayed forever within the garden of Re-mose's childhood, but time is a mother's enemy.

This was what it meant to be human, to know that time moved and all things changed.

And any small moments of intense, flaring beauty such as this morning's will be utterly forgotten, dissolved by time like a super-8 film left out in the rain, without sound, and quickly replaced by thousands of silently growing trees.

Life is but a day; A fragile dewdrop on its perilous way From a tree's summit.