Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.
E. M. FORSTERI cannot help thinking that there is something to admire in everyone, even if you do not approve of them.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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It’s not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.
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One grows accustomed to being praised, or being blamed, or being advised, but it is unusual to be understood.
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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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It makes a difference doesn’t it, whether we fully fence ourselves in, or whether we are fenced out by the barriers of others?
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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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Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
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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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Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend.
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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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Outside the arch, always there seemed another arch. And beyond the remotest echo, a silence.
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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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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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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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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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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.
E. M. FORSTER