A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
E. M. FORSTERYou confuse what’s important with what’s impressive.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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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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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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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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Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
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Human relations are impossible. When they are real they are uncomfortable, and when they are comfortable they are unreal. It was for the journey into solitude that the human soul was created.
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We move between two darknesses.
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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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Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.
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The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected.
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Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown
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Books have to be read it is the only way of discovering what they contain.
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… there are shadows because there are hills.
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People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.
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Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
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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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Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
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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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I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I’d like to be.
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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.
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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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The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world.
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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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I think you’re beautiful, the only beautiful person I’ve ever seen. I love your voice and everything to do with you, down to your clothes or the room you are sitting in. I adore you.
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I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man’s pleasure when they come a cropper.
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She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position; it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship.
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We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.
E. M. FORSTER