It’s not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.
E. M. FORSTERI 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.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
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 -
My conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.
E. M. FORSTER -
It is so difficult – at least, I find it difficult – to understand people who speak the truth.
E. M. FORSTER -
Give, do not lend; after death who will thank you?
E. M. FORSTER -
I won’t be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.
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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.
E. M. FORSTER -
The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.
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Unless we remember we cannot understand.
E. M. FORSTER -
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.
E. M. FORSTER -
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
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At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
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 -
One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
E. M. FORSTER -
Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time – beautiful?
E. M. FORSTER