E. M. Forster Quotes
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The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.
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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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Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.
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It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.
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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.
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Your letter firmed me up a lot. It certainly is a comfort to know that my work is respected by someone whom I respect and am as fond as you. It confirms my beliefe that life is notall nonsense and cruelty-the inversion of Victorian complacency-but has hard spots of sense and love bobbing about in it here and there.
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I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people who irritate me, and the people I'd like to be.
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I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.
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No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.
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It isn’t possible to love and to part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know from experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
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Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
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Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.
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Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.
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The woman who can't influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself.
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Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
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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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It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why history is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead.
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If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.
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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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America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for. It will probably be interesting, and it is sure to be large.
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There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.
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Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.
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Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.
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To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.