E. M. Forster Quotes
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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.
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Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.
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Laughing at mankind is rather weary rot, I think. We shall never meet with anyone nicer. Nature, whom I used to be keen on, is too unfair. She evokes plenty of high & exhausting feelings, and offers nothing in return.
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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.
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Pathos, piety, courage, - they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.
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If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious.
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He doesn't want you to be real, and to think and to live. He doesn't love you. But I love you. I want you to have your own thoughts and ideas and feelings, even when I hold you in my arms.
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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 . . . .
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Do you suppose there's any difference between spring in nature and spring in man? But there we go, praising the one and condemning the other as improper, ashamed that the same laws work eternally through both.
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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.
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I enjoy French poetry as well as French prose, and I believe that this land must have some cultural connection with the European continent, and that she is best connected through her spiritual complement across the Straits of Dover.
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Self-pity? I see no moral objections to it, the smell drives people away, but that's a practical objection, and occasionally an advantage.
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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.
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There's enough sorrow in the world, isn't there, without trying to invent it.
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One can run away from women, turn them out, or give in to them. No fourth course.
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There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.
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An efficiency-regime cannot be run without a few heroes stuck about it to carry off the dullness - much as plums have to be put into bad pudding to make it palatable.
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Characters must not brood too long. They must not waste time running up and down ladders in their own insides.
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The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say "yesterday I was happy, today I am not.
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Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.
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Science explained people, but could not understand them. After long centuries among the bones and muscles it might be advancing to knowledge of the nerves, but this would never give understanding
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I have said that each aspect of the novel demands a different quality of the reader. Well, the prophetic aspect demands two qualities: humility and the suspension of the sense of humour.
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Tolerance is just a makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends.
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Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time - beautiful?