If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
E. M. FORSTERIt 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.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
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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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We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
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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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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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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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At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
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The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.
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I can only do what’s easy. I can only entice and be enticed. I can’t, and won’t, attempt difficult relations. If I marry it will either be a man who’s strong enough to boss me or whom I’m strong enough to boss.
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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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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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… there are shadows because there are hills.
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One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
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I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.
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It’s not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.
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Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
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The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a plot.
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The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world.
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I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.
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We move between two darknesses.
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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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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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Don’t be mysterious; there isn’t the time.
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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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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.
E. M. FORSTER