E. M. Forster Quotes
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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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The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.
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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.
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Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
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There is much good luck in the world, but it is luck. We are none of us safe. We are children, playing or quarrelling on the line.
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The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.
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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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At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes.
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Tolerance is a very dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is negative. It merely means putting up with people, being able to stand things.
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Two cheers for Democracy; one because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism.
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Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!
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Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.
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A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.
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It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.
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Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
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The people I admire most are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power.
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Liking one person is an extra reason for liking another.
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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.
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Happiness in the ordinary sense is not what one needs in life, though one is right to aim at it. The true satisfaction is to come through and see those whom one loves come through.
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It is impossible to foretell the future with any degree of accuracy, that it is impossible to rehearse life. A fault in the scenery, a face in the audience, an interruption of the audience on to the stage, and all our carefully planned gesture mean nothing, or mean too much.
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One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
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Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.
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It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.
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Adventures do occur, but not punctually.