We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
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Quotes by E. M. Forster
Explore 25 verified and sourced quotes attributed to E. M. Forster. Open any quote for its dedicated page, source details and related topics.
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Selected quotes by E. M. Forster
One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
Unless we remember we cannot understand.
I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.
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.
What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?
The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.
Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
Love is always being given where it is not required.
Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's.
The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.
Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return.
To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.
Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.
We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.
Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.
Tolerance is a very dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is negative. It merely means putting up with people, being able to stand things.
So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.
The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance.
Ideas are fatal to caste.
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