Don’t begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed.
E. M. FORSTERWorks of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don’t believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art’s sake.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.
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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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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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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.
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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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The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world.
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Though life is very glorious, it is difficult.
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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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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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My conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.
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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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Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.
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Outside the arch, always there seemed another arch. And beyond the remotest echo, a silence.
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Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.
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Money pads the edges of things.
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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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But the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable.
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I can only do what’s easy. I can only entice and be enticed. I can’t, and won’t, attempt difficult relations. If I marry it will either be a man who’s strong enough to boss me or whom I’m strong enough to boss.
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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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Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
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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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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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Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown
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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 must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
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Don’t be mysterious; there isn’t the time.
E. M. FORSTER