E. M. Forster Quotes

I don't think human affection and compassion are just religious concerns; they're indispensable factors in our day-to-day lives.

To be sure, theory is useful. But without warmth of heart and without love it bruises the very ones it claims to save.

Of all the needs that we have right now, more than anything we need a time for love.

As we learn to share and give and care, love increases. A person who knows how to love does not seem to feel lonely or alone. In this sense, the power of love can become a true weapon against harm.

We are hardwired to connect with others, it's what gives purpose and meaning to our lives, and without it there is suffering.

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.

Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.

I'll meet someone on the street and blurt out my most intimate details. I think everybody secretly - or not so secretly - wants to be understood, and I just want to connect, you know?

There are realities we all share, regardless of our nationality, language, or individual tastes. As we need food, so do we need emotional nourishment: love, kindness, appreciation, and support from others.

Intimacy and community buffer stress.

I have always been very interested in the idea of loneliness and the presumption that romantic relationships are supposed to rid you of that.

I said there are at least two kinds of satisfaction, however, and the other has nothing to do with skill. It comes from human connection. It comes from making others happy, understanding them, loving them.

Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.

The value of emotions comes from sharing them, not just having them.

You have to understand, child. Everyone wants someone in their life, someone who cares for them, someone they can care for. Even a queen.

People need other people to feel things for them," she said. "It gets lonely to feel things all by yourself.

The last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in a sexual way. But it says one of the simplest things you could ever say, which is that we must try and be inside each other. We must have some kind of feeling for each other and enter into each other's experience.

No matter how many weapons you have, no matter how great your technology might be, the world cannot live without love.

All living beings have experience of pleasure and pain, and we are among them. What makes human beings different is that we have a powerful intelligence and a much greater ability to achieve happiness and avoid suffering. Real happiness and friendship come not from money or even knowledge, but from warm-heartednes s. Once we recognize this we will be more inclined to cultivate it.

Giving to other people makes me feel alive. Not my car or my house. Not what I look like in the mirror. When I give my time, when I can make someone smile after they were feeling sad.

Most people need love and acceptance a lot more than they need advice.

The happiness you feel is in direct proportion to the love you give.

More and more do I feel, as I advance in life, how little we really know of each other. Friendship seems to me like the touch of musical-glasses--it is only contact; but the glasses themselves, and their contents, remain quite distinct and unmingled.

Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. This is something else I've discovered for myself very recently. I present it to you as a hypothesis: Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain.

Because by now Elinor had understood this, too: A longing for books was nothing compared with what you could feel for human beings. The books told you about that feeling. The books spoke of love, and it was wonderful to listen to them, but they were no substitute for love itself. They couldn't kiss her like Meggie, they couldn't hug her like Resa, they couldn't laugh like Mortimer. Poor books, poor Elinor.