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He educated Maurice, or rather his spirit educated Maurice's spirit, for they themselves became equal. Neither thought Am I led am I leading? Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection.

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
Two
Touch
Maurice
Thought
Perfection
Triviality
Soul
Neither
Bewilderment
Might
Became
Imperfect
Love
Equal
Leading
Rather
Educated
Spirit
Souls
Order
Caught

More quotes by E. M. Forster

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I do not believe in Belief.
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The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal. Both assumptions are false: both of them must be accepted as true if we are to go on eating and working and loving, and are to keep open a few breathing holes for the human spirit.
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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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Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.
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Words deserted him immediately. He could only speak when he was not asked to.
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What the world most needs today are negative virtues - not minding people, not being huffy, touchy, irritable or revengeful.
E. M. Forster
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For you cannot have gentility without paying for it.
E. M. Forster
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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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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
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But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.
E. M. Forster
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But I have seen my obstacles: trivialities, learning and poetry. This last needs explaining: the old artist's readiness to dissolve characters into a haze. Characters cannot come alive and fight and guide the world unless the novelist wants them to remain characters.
E. M. Forster
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Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it.
E. M. Forster
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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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Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown
E. M. Forster
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What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
E. M. Forster
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The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected.
E. M. Forster
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This element of surprise or mystery the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called is of great importance in a plot.
E. M. Forster
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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?
E. M. Forster
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Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate.
E. M. Forster
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While her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to tea
E. M. Forster