What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
E. M. FORSTERThe main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.
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You confuse what’s important with what’s impressive.
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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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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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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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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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It isn’t possible to love and to part.
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But the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable.
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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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There are moments when the inner life actually ‘pays,’ when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.
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Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.
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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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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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It’s not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.
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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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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 believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It’s one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.
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Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown
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There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.
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Life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t’other from which . . .
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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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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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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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Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.
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There’s never any great risk as long as you have money.
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I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.
E. M. FORSTER