E. M. Forster Quotes
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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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Adventures do occur, but not punctually.
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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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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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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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No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.
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Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
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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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Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
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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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Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.
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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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Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.
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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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The woman who can't influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself.
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If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.
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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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For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.
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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.
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Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.
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Love felt and returned, love which our bodies exact and our hearts have transfigured, love which is the most real thing that we shall ever meet, reappeared now as the world's enemy, and she must stifle it.
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Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.