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Happiness in the ordinary sense is not what one needs in life, though one is right to aim at it. The true satisfaction is to come through, and see those whom one lives come through.

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
Come
Aim
Right
Satisfaction
Needs
Ordinary
Life
Though
Happiness
Lives
Sense
True

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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.
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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.
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One can run away from women, turn them out, or give in to them. No fourth course.
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Those who search for truth are too conscious of the maze to be hard on others...
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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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I hated the idleness, the stupidity, the respectability, the petty unselfishness.
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I am actually what my age and my upbringing have made me - a bourgeois who adheres to the British constitution, adheres to it rather than supports it, and the fact that this isn't dignified doesn't worry me.
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Man can learn everything if he will but try.
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If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting--both for us and for her.
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The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.
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Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.
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Expansion, that is the idea the novelist must cling to, not completion, not rounding off, but opening out.
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I do like Christmas on the whole.... In its clumsy way, it does approach Peace and Goodwill. But it is clumsier every year.
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Don't be mysterious there isn't the time.
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Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.
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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.
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I have said that each aspect of the novel demands a different quality of the reader. Well, the prophetic aspect demands two qualities: humility and the suspension of the sense of humour.
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Don't believe those lies about intellectual people. They're only written to soothe the majority.
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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It is easy to sympathize at a distance,' said an old gentleman with a beard. 'I value more the kind word that is spoken close to my ear.
E. M. Forster