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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
Success
Prepared
Shows
Waste
Might
Career
Unprepared
Must
Careers
Unsuccessful
Never
Strength
Removed
Men
Successful
Mountains
Taken
Preparation
Show
Mountain
More quotes by E. M. Forster
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.
E. M. Forster
All men are equal — all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas.
E. M. Forster
Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.
E. M. Forster
Money pads the edges of things.
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
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.
E. M. Forster
Human beings have their great chance in the novel.
E. M. Forster
The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.
E. M. Forster
For you cannot have gentility without paying for it.
E. M. Forster
By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes--a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.
E. M. Forster
Pathos, piety, courage, they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.
E. M. Forster
Expansion, that is the idea the novelist must cling to, not completion, not rounding off, but opening out.
E. M. Forster
Self-pity? I see no moral objections to it, the smell drives people away, but that's a practical objection, and occasionally an advantage.
E. M. Forster
Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.
E. M. Forster
Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.
E. M. Forster
English literature is a flying fish.
E. M. Forster
We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.
E. M. Forster
Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.
E. M. Forster
Towns are after all excrescences, grey fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.
E. M. Forster
You want to love everyone equally, and that's worse than impossible--it's wrong.
E. M. Forster
