The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.
E. M. FORSTERBut the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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Don’t begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed.
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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.
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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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I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.
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It’s not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.
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The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.
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You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.
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The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.
E. M. FORSTER -
It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons.
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Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
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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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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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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.
E. M. FORSTER -
Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?
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Think before you speak is criticism’s motto; speak before you think, creation’s.
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She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position; it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship.
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How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
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The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
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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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One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
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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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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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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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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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Life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t’other from which . . .
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Adventures do occur, but not punctually.
E. M. FORSTER