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The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.
E. M. Forster
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E. M. Forster
Age: 91 †
Born: 1879
Born: January 1
Died: 1970
Died: June 7
Biographer
Essayist
Librettist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
London
England
Edward Morgan Forster
E Forster
EM Forster
Fact
Assumes
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Spectator
Art
Spectators
Persons
Indifferent
Person
Assuming
Work
Exists
Existence
Perfect
More quotes by E. M. Forster
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
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Solidity, caution, integrity, efficiency. Lack of imagination, hypocrisy. These qualities characterize the middle classes in everycountry, but in England they are national characteristics.
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The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.
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England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.
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All that is observable in a man-that is to say his actions and such of his spiritual existence as can be deduced from his actions-falls into the domain of history.
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I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.
E. M. Forster
It is the starved imagination, not the well nourished, that is afraid.
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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?
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Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?
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Man has to pick up the use of his functions as he goes along- especially the function of Love.
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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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When I think of what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love it is one of the moments for which the world was made.
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Do you remember Italy?
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Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a great mistake and degenerates into defensiveness or hypocrisy.
E. M. Forster
Ah, but you see, I didn't want to be fair.
E. M. Forster
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.
E. M. Forster
Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!
E. M. Forster
A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.
E. M. Forster
[...] 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 contray the Christian danger.
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It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.
E. M. Forster