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.
E. M. FORSTERWe move between two darknesses.
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.
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The other damned saw what was happening and caught hold of it too. She was indignant and cried, “Let go-it’s my onion,” and as soon as she said, “my onion,” the stalk broke and she fell back into the flames.
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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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One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.
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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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Outside the arch, always there seemed another arch. And beyond the remotest echo, a silence.
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… there are shadows because there are hills.
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How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
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Works 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.
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I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.
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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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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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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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One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
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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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It’s not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.
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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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Aziz winked at him slowly and said: “…There are many ways of being a man; mine is to express what is deepest in my heart.
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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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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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We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.
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Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time – beautiful?
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But the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable.
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Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
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The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.
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It is so difficult – at least, I find it difficult – to understand people who speak the truth.
E. M. FORSTER