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There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.

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
Human
Represent
Humans
Cruelty
Sensitive
Permanent
Chaos
Tradition
Victory
True
Aristocracy

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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.
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There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.
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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.
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Pathos, piety, courage, they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.
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I really don't know what happens next -- one so seldom does.
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I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.
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Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.
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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.
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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.
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But after all, what have we to do with taverns? Real menace belongs to the drawing-room.
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Riposte of that old lady in the anecdote who was accused by her nieces of being illogical, Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish! How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?
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It is the starved imagination, not the well nourished, that is afraid.
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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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It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.
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I'd far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.
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My law-givers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul.
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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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Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
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She must be assured that it is not a criminal offense to love at first sight.
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There's never any great risk as long as you have money.
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