E. M. Forster Quotes

Guess what? Human beings are complex.

Science explained people, but could not understand them. After long centuries among the bones and muscles it might be advancing to knowledge of the nerves, but this would never give understanding

Those who have a tolerable knowledge of human nature will not stand in need of such lights.

I'm insatiably curious about human nature.

How can one know anything at all about people?

Human beings are very complex creatures. This desire, this greed, this love is very complex.

Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human.

The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.

I think the word 'soul' - it depends on what you define by 'soul.' If you're defining it as a mystical aura that is outside the body, I cannot measure that. If you're talking about soul as human nature, the rank of spectrum of behaviors and reactions that we know humans produce under certain circumstances, that is measurable.

The questions of philosophy proper are human desires and fears and aspirations - human emotions - taking an intellectual form.

Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason

I've always read in order to figure out people more, and that includes bad people and good people.

From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.

What does it mean to be human, and what is at the human heart, and is there a soul, or is that all there is? Can an artificial being be intelligent? Is 'intelligent' the definition of humanity, or is it something deeper?

Our dream is to one day uncover the essence of what makes us human.

As humans, we are not so rationalist as we think we are. I think our biggest quality is indeed that we are human, truly human: if our biggest quality would be rationality, we would lose our soul.

I'm very interested in people, so if a character happens to be real, there's that much more to look at.

Novels are . . . an unsurpassed form to understand people.

Human beings can be awful, but they can also be tremendous.

We care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are.

I grew up around people, so I know 'em, and I do like playin' 'em. I'm not religious, but I am kind of a spiritual fanatic, so maybe I understand them in that way.

The first thing you should know about people is that you don’t know the first thing about them.

The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.

I will confess that I have no more sense of what goes on in the mind of mankind than I have for the mind of an ant.

Mind is the partial side of men; the heart is everything.