Adventures do occur, but not punctually.
E. M. FORSTERYou told me once that we shall be judged by our intentions, not by our accomplishments. I thought it a grand remark. But we must intend to accomplish – not sit intending on a chair.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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But the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable.
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There’s never any great risk as long as you have money.
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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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How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
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To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.
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When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.
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Human relations are impossible. When they are real they are uncomfortable, and when they are comfortable they are unreal. It was for the journey into solitude that the human soul was created.
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For it is a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.
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Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown
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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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It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and, close below, Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road.
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My conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.
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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.
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I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.
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I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.
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… there are shadows because there are hills.
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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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You told me once that we shall be judged by our intentions, not by our accomplishments. I thought it a grand remark. But we must intend to accomplish – not sit intending on a chair.
E. M. FORSTER -
I can only do what’s easy. I can only entice and be enticed. I can’t, and won’t, attempt difficult relations. If I marry it will either be a man who’s strong enough to boss me or whom I’m strong enough to boss.
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The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected.
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When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.
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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.
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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.
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Unless we remember we cannot understand.
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Do not be proud of your inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped like this. It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive and truthful.
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Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.
E. M. FORSTER