If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
E. M. FORSTERMistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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Don’t be mysterious; there isn’t the time.
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One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
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I 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.
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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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There’s never any great risk as long as you have money.
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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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I cannot help thinking that there is something to admire in everyone, even if you do not approve of them.
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There are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim, “I do enjoy myself”, or , “I am horrified,” we are insincere.
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One has two duties – to be worried and not to be worried.
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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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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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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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We move between two darknesses.
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The historian records, but the novelist creates.
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We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
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I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.
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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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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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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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Give, do not lend; after death who will thank you?
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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.
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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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I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.
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Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
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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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It is so difficult – at least, I find it difficult – to understand people who speak the truth.
E. M. FORSTER