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.
E. M. FORSTERThe 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.
More E. M. Forster Quotes
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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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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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I cannot help thinking that there is something to admire in everyone, even if you do not approve of them.
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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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There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.
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One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.
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The emotions may be endless. The more we express them, the more we may have to express.
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Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
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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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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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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 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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Give, do not lend; after death who will thank you?
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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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Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.
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You told me once that we shall be judged by our intentions, not by our accomplishments. I thought it a grand remark. But we must intend to accomplish – not sit intending on a chair.
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You confuse what’s important with what’s impressive.
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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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… there are shadows because there are hills.
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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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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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You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of 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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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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Don’t be mysterious; there isn’t the time.
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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.
E. M. FORSTER