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The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken.
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
Might
Career
Unprepared
Must
Careers
Unsuccessful
Never
Strength
Removed
Men
Successful
Mountains
Taken
Preparation
Show
Mountain
Success
Prepared
Shows
Waste
More quotes by E. M. Forster
I'd far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.
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All men are equal — all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas.
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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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Their quarrel was no more surprising than are most quarrels — inevitable at the time, incredible afterwards.
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For it is a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.
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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
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.
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Do you remember Italy?
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When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you're always protecting me... I won't be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can't I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A woman's place!
E. M. Forster
It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.
E. M. Forster
All a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents. Destroy that and everything goes — morals, behaviour, everything. Absolute trust in some one else is the essence of education.
E. M. Forster
Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.
E. M. Forster
Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.
E. M. Forster
Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.
E. M. Forster
Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.
E. M. Forster
Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.
E. M. Forster
The present flowed by them like a stream. The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment. The moment had passed. The tree rustled again. Their senses were sharpened, and they seemed to apprehend life. Life passed. The tree rustled again.
E. M. Forster
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
The Germans are called brutal, the Spanish cruel, the Americans superficial, and so on but we are perfide Albion, the island of hypocrites, the people who have built up an Empire with a Bible in one hand, a pistol in the other, and financial concessions in both pockets. Is the charge true? I think it is.
E. M. Forster
Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darkness's.
E. M. Forster
