The historian records, but the novelist creates.
E. M. FORSTERThe four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.
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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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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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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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To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.
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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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Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
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We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won’t do harm – yes, choose a place where you won’t do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.
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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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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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The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.
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There are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim, “I do enjoy myself”, or , “I am horrified,” we are insincere.
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Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talks that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.
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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 move between two darknesses.
E. M. FORSTER