At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
E. M. FORSTERAt night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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You told me once that we shall be judged by our intentions, not by our accomplishments. I thought it a grand remark. But we must intend to accomplish – not sit intending on a chair.
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Books have to be read it is the only way of discovering what they contain.
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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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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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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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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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Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
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Adventures do occur, but not punctually.
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The sort of poetry I seek only resides in objects Man can’t touch – like England ‘s grass network of lanes 100 years ago, but today he can destroy them and only Lord Farrer keeps him from doing it.
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Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time – beautiful?
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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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I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.
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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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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 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.
E. M. FORSTER