When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.
E. M. FORSTERMistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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It is easy to sympathize at a distance,’ said an old gentleman with a beard. ‘I value more the kind word that is spoken close to my ear.
E. M. FORSTER -
School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.
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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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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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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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Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
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The emotions may be endless. The more we express them, the more we may have to express.
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I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.
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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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The sort of poetry I seek only resides in objects Man can’t touch – like England ‘s grass network of lanes 100 years ago, but today he can destroy them and only Lord Farrer keeps him from doing it.
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One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.
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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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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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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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Life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t’other from which . . .
E. M. FORSTER