E. M. Forster Quotes

The ancients, even though they believed in destiny , believed primarily in nature , in which they participated wholeheartedly. To rebel against nature amounted to rebelling against oneself. It was butting one's head against a wall.

Life set itself to new processions of seed-time and harvest, the skin newly turned to seasonal variations, the very blood humming to new altitudes.

Spring is like a perhaps hand

I am thankful that in a troubled world no calamity can prevent the return of spring.

Wag the world how it will, Leaves must be green in Spring.

The course of the seasons is a piece of clockwork, with a cuckoo to call when it is spring.

How sad would be November if we had no knowledge of the spring!

The generation of mankind is like the generation of leaves. The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the living tree burgeons with leaves again in the spring.

A generation of men is like a generation of leaves; the wind scatters some leaves upon the ground, while others the burgeoning wood brings forth - and the season of spring comes on. So of men one generation springs forth and another ceases.

In a way Winter is the real Spring - the time when the inner things happen, the resurgence of nature.

But like of each thing that in season grows.

But now it was spring again, and spring was almost unbearable for sensitive hearts. It drove creation to its utmost limits, it wafted its spice-laden breath even into the nostrils of the innocent.

Sex and hypocrisy. They go together like coffee and cream.

The end may be defined as life in accordance with nature or, in other words, in accordance with our own human nature as well as that of the universe.

In a way, human beings have never been part of the natural order; we're not biological in the normal sense. Normal biological animals stop eating when they're not hungry and stop breeding when there is no sense in breeding. By contrast, human beings are what I think of as "biomythic" animals: we're controlled largely by the stories we tell. When we get the story wrong, we get out of harmony with the rest of the natural order. For a long time, our unnatural beahvior didn't threaten the natural world, but now it does.

When the measured dance of the hours brings back the happy smile of spring, the buried dead is born again in the life-glance of the sun. The germs which perished to the eye within the cold breast of the earth spring up with joy in the bright realm of day.

We live in an essential and unresolvable tension between our unity with nature and our dangerous uniqueness. Systems that attempt to place and make sense of us by focusing exclusively either on the uniqueness or the unity are doomed to failure. But we must not stop asking and questing because the answers are complex and ambiguous.

Spring, summer, and fall fill us with hope; winter alone reminds us of the human condition.

He was too perfect, despite being one of the most imperfect people I knew.