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Pathos, piety, courage, they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.
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
Exists
Exist
Value
Courage
Values
Pathos
Everything
Filth
Nothing
Piety
Identical
More quotes by E. M. Forster
Solidity, caution, integrity, efficiency. Lack of imagination, hypocrisy. These qualities characterize the middle classes in everycountry, but in England they are national characteristics.
E. M. Forster
She loved him absolutely, perhaps for half an hour.
E. M. Forster
I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.
E. M. Forster
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
If God could tell the story of the Universe, the Universe would become fictitious.
E. M. Forster
Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque. A touch will loosen it, and the sooner it goes from us the better.
E. M. Forster
At times our need for a sympathetic gesture is so great that we care not what exactly it signifies or how much we may have to pay for it afterwards.
E. M. Forster
Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West.
E. M. Forster
I don't know what to think until I see what I've said.
E. M. Forster
Tolerance is just a makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends.
E. M. Forster
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
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
Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.
E. M. Forster
There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.
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
Do not be proud of your inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped like this. It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive and truthful.
E. M. Forster
A mirror does not develop because an historical pageant passes in front of it. It only develops when it gets a fresh coat of quicksilver in other words, when it acquires new sensitiveness and the novel's success lies in its own sensitiveness, not in the success of its subject matter.
E. M. Forster
If only the sense of actuality can be lulled-and it sleeps for ever in most historians-there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.
E. M. Forster
One grows accustomed to being praised, or being blamed, or being advised, but it is unusual to be understood.
E. M. Forster
I hated the idleness, the stupidity, the respectability, the petty unselfishness.
E. M. Forster
