E. M. Forster Quotes
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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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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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The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.
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One is certain of nothing but the truth of one's own emotions.
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England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.
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Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's.
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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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I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.
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Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.
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Love is always being given where it is not required.
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The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
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Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.
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The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.
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Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.
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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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Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
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Unless we remember we cannot understand.
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I never could get on with representative individuals but people who existed on their own account and with whom it might therefore be possible to be friends.
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So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.
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Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden. It is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.
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There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.
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The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance.
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I am certainly an ought and not a must.
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Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return.