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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Grief is the price we pay for love.
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My dad can be pretty critical sometimes.
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Never explain, never complain.
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I have always had the courage for the new things that life sometimes offers.
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For a gallant spirit there can never be defeat.
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You can never be too rich or too thin.
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We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.
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What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our d...
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To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the ...
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History develops, art stands still.
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How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
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I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.
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Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's.
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We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.
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The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in...
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Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.
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Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.
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Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to l...
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Two cheers for Democracy; one because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism.
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Love is always being given where it is not required.
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The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in...
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Only a struggle twists sentimentality and lust together into love.
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I'm a holy man minus the holiness.
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A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing ...
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The idea that nations should love one another, or that business concerns or marketing boards should ...
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Death destroys a man, the idea of Death saves him.
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The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of an...
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Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
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Unless we remember we cannot understand.
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We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the stat...
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Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
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America is rather like life. You can usually find in it what you look for. It will probably be inter...
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There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one d...
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Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who ...
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Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both wil...
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Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves...
E. M. FORSTER
I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people...
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Ideas are fatal to caste.
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Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orde...
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Failure or success seem to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wr...
E. M. FORSTER
As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through e...
E. M. FORSTER
Oxford is -- Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates t...
E. M. FORSTER
Lord I disbelieve -- help thou my unbelief.
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Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when...
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Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sp...
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I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too,...
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The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will ...
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A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy d...
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Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; ...
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Tolerance is a very dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is neg...
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The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink.
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If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the gu...
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Another distinguished critic has agreed with Gide--that old lady in the anecdote who was accused by ...
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At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
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Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.
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Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality...
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Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of...
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The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the ...
E. M. FORSTER
Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage ou...
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One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
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I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gon...
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They go too far because they do not reflect what personality is. Just as words have two functions - ...
E. M. FORSTER
I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my frie...
E. M. FORSTER
Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
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I would rather be a coward than brave because people hurt you when you are brave.
E. M. FORSTER
But the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable.
E. M. FORSTER
Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order...
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We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a n...
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Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventu...
E. M. FORSTER
Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.
E. M. FORSTER
So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.
E. M. FORSTER
There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy.
E. M. FORSTER
Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.
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Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of ma...
E. M. FORSTER
Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration.
E. M. FORSTER
Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
E. M. FORSTER
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the cond...
E. M. FORSTER
. . . the crime of suicide lies rather in its disregard for the feelings of those whom we leave behi...
E. M. FORSTER
Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageab...
E. M. FORSTER
Pathos, piety, courage, — they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothin...
E. M. FORSTER
Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the ...
E. M. FORSTER
Life -- No, I've nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.
E. M. FORSTER
I believe we shall come to care about people less and less. The more people one knows the easier it ...
E. M. FORSTER
Only connect.
E. M. FORSTER
The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.
E. M. FORSTER
Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what t...
E. M. FORSTER
So, Two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism
E. M. FORSTER
It is the one orderly product our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels,...
E. M. FORSTER
There is much good luck in the world, but it is luck. We are none of us safe. We are children, playi...
E. M. FORSTER
They go forth with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds and undeveloped hearts. An undevelo...
E. M. FORSTER
I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gon...
E. M. FORSTER
Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that shoul...
E. M. FORSTER
The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little fart...
E. M. FORSTER
I have been racking my brains and can find no reply [to] this very reasonable question. I can only s...
E. M. FORSTER
A facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade, every type of dubiousness.
E. M. FORSTER
I have only got down on to paper, really, three types of people: the person I think I am, the people...
E. M. FORSTER
For our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge tha...
E. M. FORSTER
The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.
E. M. FORSTER
The best way to know Alexandria is to wander aimlessly
E. M. FORSTER
Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.
E. M. FORSTER
If there is on earth a house with many mansions, it is the house of words.
E. M. FORSTER
This opera is my Nunc Dimittis, in that it dismisses me peacefully and convinces me I have achieved.
E. M. FORSTER
You remember how he would trust strangers, and if they fooled him he would say, 'It's better to be f...
E. M. FORSTER
But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to mer...
E. M. FORSTER
Unless we remember we cannot understand
E. M. FORSTER
It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die--neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the...
E. M. FORSTER
The so-called white races are really pinko-grey
E. M. FORSTER
I am so used to seeing the sort of play which deals with one man and two women. They do not leave me...
E. M. FORSTER
I have no mystic faith in the people. I have in the individual.
E. M. FORSTER
At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes
E. M. FORSTER
Away she hurried, not beautiful, not supremely brilliant, but filled with something that took the pl...
E. M. FORSTER
Think before you speak is criticism's motto; speak before you think, creation's
E. M. FORSTER
Some twenty years her senior, he preserved a gift that she supposed herself to have already lost--no...
E. M. FORSTER
You can transmute love, muddle it, ignore it... but you can never pull it out of you...
E. M. FORSTER
Ideas are fatal to caste
E. M. FORSTER
Most quarrels are inevitable at the time; incredible afterwards.
E. M. FORSTER
Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face. The beauty who ...
E. M. FORSTER
It is my fate and perhaps my temperament to sign agreements with fools.
E. M. FORSTER
Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.
E. M. FORSTER
One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.
E. M. FORSTER
Only people who have been allowed to practise freedom can have the grown-up look in their eyes.
E. M. FORSTER
England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.
E. M. FORSTER
I never could get on with representative individuals but people who existed on their own account and...
E. M. FORSTER
Reverence is fatal to literature.
E. M. FORSTER
Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.
E. M. FORSTER
One marvels why the middle classes still insist on so much discomfort for their children at such exp...
E. M. FORSTER
People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, ...
E. M. FORSTER
No one is India.
E. M. FORSTER
The woman who can't influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herse...
E. M. FORSTER
I am certainly an ought and not a must.
E. M. FORSTER
It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness.
E. M. FORSTER
The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.
E. M. FORSTER
Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
E. M. FORSTER
The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.
E. M. FORSTER
No man can be an agnostic who has a sense of humour.
E. M. FORSTER
Surely the only sound foundation for a civilization is a sound state of mind.
E. M. FORSTER
At the side of the everlasting why, is a yes, and a yes, and a yes.
E. M. FORSTER
The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
E. M. FORSTER
I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too,...
E. M. FORSTER
The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then queen died of grief is a p...
E. M. FORSTER
One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
E. M. FORSTER
Some closing of the gates is inevitable after thirty, if the mind itself is to become a creative pow...
E. M. FORSTER
I believe we shall come to care about people less and less. The more people one knows the easier it ...
EDWARD M. FORSTER
Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something...
EDWARD M. FORSTER
Very notable was his distinction between coarseness and vulgarity, coarseness, revealing something; ...
EDWARD M. FORSTER
Lord I disbelieve -- help thou my unbelief.
EDWARD M. FORSTER
Unless we remember we cannot understand.
EDWARD M. FORSTER
Ideas are fatal to caste.
EDWARD M. FORSTER
Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage ou...
EDWARD M. FORSTER
Curiosity is one of the lowest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when...
EDWARD M. FORSTER
At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
EDWARD M. FORSTER
The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the ...
EDWARD M. FORSTER
Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
E. M. CIORAN
The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.
E. M. CIORAN
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
E. M. CIORAN
The difference between a boss and a leader: a boss says, 'Go!' - a leader says, 'Let's go!'
E. M. KELLY
One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland --and n...
E. M. CIORAN
Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people...
E. M. CIORAN
A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its se...
E. M. CIORAN
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal ther...
E. M. CIORAN
Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
E. M. CIORAN
A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals h...
E. M. CIORAN
Few persons are made of such strong fiber that they will make a costly outlay when surface work will...
E. M. BOUNDS
Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations ...
E. M. CIORAN
Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
E. M. CIORAN
To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
E. M. CIORAN
Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untain...
E. M. CIORAN
A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
E. M. CIORAN
God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
E. M. CIORAN
Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent --unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaus...
E. M. CIORAN
What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striv...
E. M. CIORAN
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
E. M. CIORAN
When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances,...
E. M. CIORAN
It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
E. M. CIORAN
The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose atte...
E. M. CIORAN
Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not fi...
E. M. CIORAN
Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ours...
E. M. CIORAN
Those who believe in their truth -- the only ones whose imprint is retained by the memory of men -- ...
E. M. CIORAN
What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
E. M. CIORAN
Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
E. M. CIORAN
Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist --a demo...
E. M. CIORAN
Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.
E. M. CIORAN
No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are ...
E. M. CIORAN
We derive our vitality from our store of madness.
E. M. CIORAN
The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, th...
E. M. CIORAN
Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than...
E. M. CIORAN
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.
E. M. CIORAN
Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
E. M. CIORAN
To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.
E. M. CIORAN
No one can keep his grieves in their prime; they use themselves up.
E. M. CIORAN
The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for on...
E. M. CIORAN
Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.
E. M. CIORAN
We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone wo...
E. M. CIORAN
The difference between a boss and a leader: a boss says, 'Go!' -a leader says, 'Let's go!'.
E. M. KELLY
Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.
E. M. CIORAN
Much more than our other needs and endeavors, it is sexuality that puts us on an even footing with o...
E. M. CIORAN
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal the...
E. M. CIORAN
The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for on...
E. M. CIORAN
Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encount...
E. M. CIORAN
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal ther...
E. M. CIORAN
Earnestness is good and impressive: genius is gifted and great. Thought kindles and inspires, but it...
E. M. BOUNDS
Prayer is the creator as well as the channel of devotion. The spirit of devotion is the spirit of pr...
E. M. BOUNDS
We love orthodoxy. It is good. It is the best. It is the clean, clear cut teaching of God's Word, th...
E. M. BOUNDS
Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
E. M. CIORAN
There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
E. M. CIORAN