One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.
E. M. FORSTERMy 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.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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Give, do not lend; after death who will thank you?
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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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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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One grows accustomed to being praised, or being blamed, or being advised, but it is unusual to be understood.
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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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Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.
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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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Sometimes 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.
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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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Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.
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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 cannot help thinking that there is something to admire in everyone, even if you do not approve of them.
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The historian records, but the novelist creates.
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I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It’s one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.
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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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Money pads the edges of things.
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Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
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Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown
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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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At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
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The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
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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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Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?
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It isn’t possible to love and to part.
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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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Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.
E. M. FORSTER