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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.

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
Men
Move
Historian
World
Personal
Conception
Dead
Behave
Literature
Gain
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Experiences
Use
Gains
Experience
Otherwise
Must
Genius
Historians

More quotes by E. M. Forster

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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!
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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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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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Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due - she reminds us too much of a prima donna.
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There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.
E. M. Forster
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Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.
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All men are equal — all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas.
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You talk as if a god had made the Machine, cried the other. I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but not everything.
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They had nothing in common but the English language.
E. M. Forster
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One has two duties - to be worried and not to be worried.
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The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world.
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England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature--for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk.
E. M. Forster
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I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.
E. M. Forster
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Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.
E. M. Forster
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There's never any great risk as long as you have money.
E. M. Forster
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Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer
E. M. Forster
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Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darkness's.
E. M. Forster
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Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
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When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.
E. M. Forster
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We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.
E. M. Forster