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. FORSTERThere is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world.
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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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Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.
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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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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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If we act the truth the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run
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Outside the arch, always there seemed another arch. And beyond the remotest echo, a silence.
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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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But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.
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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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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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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.
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It is so difficult – at least, I find it difficult – to understand people who speak the truth.
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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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Books have to be read it is the only way of discovering what they contain.
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If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
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Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
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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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You confuse what’s important with what’s impressive.
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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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The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
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The historian records, but the novelist creates.
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I won’t be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.
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Unless we remember we cannot understand.
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One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
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Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?
E. M. FORSTER