Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.
E. M. FORSTERSometimes I think too much fuss is made about marriage. Century after century of carnal embracement and we’re still no nearer to understanding one another.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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Think before you speak is criticism’s motto; speak before you think, creation’s.
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My conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.
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When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.
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Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown
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I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.
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We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.
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Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.
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How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
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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.
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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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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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One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.
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Aziz winked at him slowly and said: “…There are many ways of being a man; mine is to express what is deepest in my heart.
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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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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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What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
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Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
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Unless we remember we cannot understand.
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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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You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.
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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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I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.
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I cannot help thinking that there is something to admire in everyone, even if you do not approve of them.
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There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.
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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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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.
E. M. FORSTER