E. M. Forster Quotes

• Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.

  E. M. Forster

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• Science explained people, but could not understand them.

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• And if insight were sufficient, if the inner life were the whole of life, their happiness has been assured.

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• One was left, too, with a gap in Christianity: the canonical gospels do not record that Christ laughed or played. Can a man be perfect if he never laughs or plays? Krishna’s jokes may be vapid, but they bridge a gap.

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• Think before you speak is criticism’s motto; speak before you think creation’s.

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• I do not believe in Belief… Lord I disbelieve—help thou my unbelief.

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• The historian must have a third quality as well: some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead.

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• It is frivolous stuff, and how rare, how precious is frivolity! How few writers can prostitute all their powers! They are always implying ‘I am capable of higher things.’

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• It is not that the Englishman can’t feel—it is that he is afraid to feel.

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• They go forth into a world…of men who are as various as the sands of the sea; into a world of whose richness and subtlety they have no conception. They go forth into it with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds, and undeveloped hearts.

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• Ulysses…is a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell.

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• Yes—oh dear yes—the novel tells a story.

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• The echo began in some indescribable way to undermine her hold on life. Coming at a moment when she chanced to be fatigued, it had managed to murmur, ‘Pathos, piety, courage—they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.’

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• The so-called white races are really pinko-grey.

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• ‘I don’t think I understand people very well. I only know whether I like or dislike them.’ ‘Then you are an Oriental.’

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• Religion is far more acute than science, and if it only added judgement to insight, would be the greatest thing in the world.

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• There is much to be said for apathy in education.

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• Death destroys a man: the idea of death saves him.

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• Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.

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• The poor cannot always reach those whom they want to love, and they can hardly ever escape from those whom they no longer love.

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E. M. Forster (120)

Birth:	1st January, 1879
Death:	7th June, 1970
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Writer

About

Edward Morgan Forster was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. Forster's humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect ... ". His 1908 novel, A Room with a View, is his most optimistic work, while A Passage to India brought him his greatest success.

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