The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.
E. M. FORSTERYou can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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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 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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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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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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Life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t’other from which . . .
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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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For it is a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.
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It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and, close below, Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road.
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Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
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Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.
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One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.
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Though life is very glorious, it is difficult.
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I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.
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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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You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.
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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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We move between two darknesses.
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The other damned saw what was happening and caught hold of it too. She was indignant and cried, “Let go-it’s my onion,” and as soon as she said, “my onion,” the stalk broke and she fell back into the flames.
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Don’t be mysterious; there isn’t the time.
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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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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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One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.
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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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Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
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The armour of falsehood is subtly wrought out of darkness, and hides a man not only from others, but from his own soul.
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It makes a difference doesn’t it, whether we fully fence ourselves in, or whether we are fenced out by the barriers of others?
E. M. FORSTER