The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.
E. M. FORSTERBut 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.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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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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We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.
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It isn’t possible to love and to part.
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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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Do not be proud of your inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped like this. It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive and truthful.
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The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
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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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Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
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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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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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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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One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
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So I shan’t ever marry, for there aren’t such men. And Heaven help any one whom I do marry, for I shall certainly run away from him before you can say ‘Jack Robinson.
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You confuse what’s important with what’s impressive.
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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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At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
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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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I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.
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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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One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
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I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.
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But it struck him that people are not really dead until they are felt to be dead. As long as there is some misunderstanding about them, they possess a sort of immortality.
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It’s not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.
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Give, do not lend; after death who will thank you?
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One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.
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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.
E. M. FORSTER