Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all… My lawgivers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul.
E. M. FORSTERThere is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.
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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.
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I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man’s pleasure when they come a cropper.
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What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
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What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?
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Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend.
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Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.
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Outside the arch, always there seemed another arch. And beyond the remotest echo, a silence.
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She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position; it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship.
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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.
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My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in the Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is ‘Lord, I disbelieve – help thou my unbelief.
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One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
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The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.
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It is so difficult – at least, I find it difficult – to understand people who speak the truth.
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Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.
E. M. FORSTER