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In these English farms, if anywhere, one might see life steadily and see it whole, group in one vision its transitoriness and its eternal youth, connect - connect without bitterness until all men are brothers.
E. M. Forster -
A mirror does not develop because an historical pageant passes in front of it. It only develops when it gets a fresh coat of quicksilver - in other words, when it acquires new sensitiveness; and the novel's success lies in its own sensitiveness, not in the success of its subject matter.
E. M. Forster
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It is so difficult – at least, I find it difficult – to understand people who speak the truth.
E. M. Forster -
I only wish the poets would say this too: love is of the body; not the body, but of the the body. Ah! the misery that would be saved if we confessed that! Ah! for a little directness to liberate the soul!
E. M. Forster -
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.
E. M. Forster -
Science, when applied to personal relationships, is always just wrong.
E. M. Forster -
No disease of the imagination is so difficult to cure, as that which is complicated with the dread of guilt: fancy and conscience then act interchangeably upon us, and so often shift their places, that the illusions of one are not distinguished from the dictates of the other.
E. M. Forster -
What puzzles me most is your criticism that he showed 'no sense of engagement'. I haven't met the expression before, and feel bound to comment on its totalitarian tang. Engagement not with the truth as the speaker apprehends it, but with the alleged opinion of the majority of listeners.
E. M. Forster
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Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wants to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.
E. M. Forster -
Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.
E. M. Forster -
Today 29-9-34 ion the garden, rockery side, looking up to the house where Bone was working, sky bluish, very gentle, I looked without theories or self consciousness. This happens very seldom, though I can prolong the delight if I prevent my engines from restarting.
E. M. Forster -
The story of the Fall always fascinates me as a play ground, but I cannot find any profound meaning in it, because of my 'liberal' view of human nature: I cannot believe in a state of original innocence, still less in a profound meaning in it, and I am always minimising the conception and the extent of Sin and the sinfulness of sex.
E. M. Forster -
I had an interesting day's reading yesterday, with the sudden sensation of being in close contact with what I was reading. ... But as for reading how curious it is: all these books, their lore of the ages, waiting to be embraced but usually slipping out of one's nerveless hands on to the floor. When one reads properly it is as if a third person is present.
E. M. Forster -
As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take the examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one be a penny the stupider.
E. M. Forster
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There's nothing like a debate to teach one quickness. I often wish I had gone in for them when I was a youngster. It would have helped me no end.
E. M. Forster -
I am the means and not the end. I am the food and not the life. Stand by yourself, as that boy has stood. I cannot save you. For poetry is a spirit; and they that would worship it must worship in spirit and in truth.
E. M. Forster -
But that was only the beginning of her mortification. Harold had proved her wrong. He had seen that she was a shifty, shallow hypocrite. She had not dared to be alone with him since her exposure. She had never looked at him and had hardly spoken. He seemed cheerful, but what was he thinking? He would never forgive her.
E. M. Forster -
Probable that I am now better than most people and as good as I ever shall be at this game, and can therefore get to know anyone I wish, provided I am not physically repellent. And perhaps this is why personal relationships no longer seem to me a serious branch of study.
E. M. Forster -
She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position; it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship.
E. M. Forster -
I haven't made my point yet, which is that it is right to be kind and even sacrifice ourselves to people who need kindness and lie in our way - otherwise, besides failing to help them, we run into the aridity of self-development. To seek for recipients of one's goodness, to play the Potted Jesus leads to the contrary the Christian danger.
E. M. Forster
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If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious.
E. M. Forster -
Human relations are impossible. When they are real they are uncomfortable, and when they are comfortable they are unreal. It was for the journey into solitude that the human soul was created.
E. M. Forster -
He was obliged however to throw over Christianity. Those who base their conduct upon what they are rather than upon what they ought to be, always must throw it over in the end . . . .
E. M. Forster -
There's enough sorrow in the world, isn't there, without trying to invent it.
E. M. Forster