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.
E. M. FORSTERHave you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time – beautiful?
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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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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We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won’t do harm – yes, choose a place where you won’t do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.
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Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?
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Adventures do occur, but not punctually.
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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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My conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.
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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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Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
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Books have to be read it is the only way of discovering what they contain.
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I cannot help thinking that there is something to admire in everyone, even if you do not approve of them.
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One has two duties – to be worried and not to be worried.
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Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time – beautiful?
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The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.
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There’s never any great risk as long as you have money.
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Life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t’other from which . . .
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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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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.
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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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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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The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
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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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Money pads the edges of things.
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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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… there are shadows because there are hills.
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Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.
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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.
E. M. FORSTER