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. FORSTERThe four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.
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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.
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Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.
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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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At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
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How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
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The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.
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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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It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons.
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The historian records, but the novelist creates.
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There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.
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Outside the arch, always there seemed another arch. And beyond the remotest echo, a silence.
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One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.
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Unless we remember we cannot understand.
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Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.
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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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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.
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Money pads the edges of things.
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Don’t begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed.
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Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talks that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.
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She had been so wicked that in all her life she had done only one good deed-given an onion to a beggar. So she went to hell. As she lay in torment she saw the onion, lowered down from heaven by an angel. She caught hold of it. He began to pull her up.
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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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So I shan’t ever marry, for there aren’t such men. And Heaven help any one whom I do marry, for I shall certainly run away from him before you can say ‘Jack Robinson.
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I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.
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There are moments when the inner life actually ‘pays,’ when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.
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The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.
E. M. FORSTER