There are moments when the inner life actually ‘pays,’ when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.
E. M. FORSTERSo 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.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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My conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.
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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 have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.
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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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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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Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown
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The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.
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Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.
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Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.
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We move between two darknesses.
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I think you’re beautiful, the only beautiful person I’ve ever seen. I love your voice and everything to do with you, down to your clothes or the room you are sitting in. I adore you.
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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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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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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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I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.
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I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I’d like to be.
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One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.
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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 emotions may be endless. The more we express them, the more we may have to express.
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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.
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A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
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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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How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
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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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Adventures do occur, but not punctually.
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Sometimes I think too much fuss is made about marriage. Century after century of carnal embracement and we’re still no nearer to understanding one another.
E. M. FORSTER