The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.
E. M. FORSTERThere’s never any great risk as long as you have money.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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We move between two darknesses.
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The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
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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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It is so difficult – at least, I find it difficult – to understand people who speak the truth.
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Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?
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There’s never any great risk as long as you have money.
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The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.
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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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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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My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in the Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is ‘Lord, I disbelieve – help thou my unbelief.
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Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.
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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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The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.
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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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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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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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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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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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Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
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It’s not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.
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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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I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.
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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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A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
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I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.
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It isn’t possible to love and to part.
E. M. FORSTER