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Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a great mistake and degenerates into defensiveness or hypocrisy.

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
Admiration
Limited
Humility
Mistake
Quality
Defensiveness
Many
Degenerates
Great
Phases
Life
Hypocrisy

More quotes by E. M. Forster

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I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.
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.
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It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
E. M. Forster
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It makes a difference doesn't it, whether we fully fence ourselves in, or whether we are fenced out by the barriers of others?
E. M. Forster
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It is so difficult - at least, I find it difficult - to understand people who speak the truth.
E. M. Forster
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While her lips talked culture, her heart was planning to invite him to tea
E. M. Forster
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He had known so much about her once -what she thought, how she felt, the reasons for her actions. And now he only knew that he loved her, and all the other knowledge seemed passing from him just as he needed it most.
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A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.
E. M. Forster
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The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.
E. M. Forster
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Aziz winked at him slowly and said: “...There are many ways of being a man mine is to express what is deepest in my heart.
E. M. Forster
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But after all, what have we to do with taverns? Real menace belongs to the drawing-room.
E. M. Forster
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Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.
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
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When that strange race nears the dust and is condemned as untouchable, then nature remembers the physical perfection that she accomplished elsewhere, and throws out a god-not many, but one here and there, to prove to society how little its categories impress her.
E. M. Forster
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Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?
E. M. Forster
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Do you suppose there's any difference between spring in nature and spring in man? But there we go, praising the one and condemning the other as improper, ashamed that the same laws work eternally through both.
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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How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
E. M. Forster
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Only connect!...Only connect the prose and the passion.
E. M. Forster
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By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes--a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.
E. M. Forster