E. M. Forster Quotes

Mere goodness can achieve little against the power of nature.

The human-made world is mostly beyond our comprehension. Our daily survival depends on seemingly magical gizmos that provide our food, water, clothing, comfort, transportation, education, well-being, and amusement.

Mystery is gone to the certainty of technological principles. So the real terror, the real aggression against life comes in the form of the pursuit of our technological happiness.

Theology in general seems to me a substitution of human ingenuity for divine wisdom.

We are the greatest computers in this world, but now we've created the smart phone which is smarter than us now, but we're still making dumb decisions. We have given our creations more power than we have, and that to me is dumb.

Machines cannot make machines, unless back of them all are the brains and toil of men.

It is the infirmity of our nature always to believe ourselves much more unhappy than those who groan by our sides!

Few persons can be made to believe that it is not quite an easy thing to invent a method of secret writing that shall baffle investigation. Yet it may be roundly asserted that human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve.

The modern technologist is less 'sorcerer' and more 'sorcerer's apprentice'.

All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing. At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.

But now you're unhappy," he pointed out. "And?" I challenged. "That doesn't seem fair." He shrugged, but his eyes were still intense. I laughed without humour. "Hasn't anyone told you? Life isn't fair." "I believe I have heard that somewhere before," he agreed dryly.

That is very fine; but it is impossible to make the men perfect; the men will always remain the same as they are now; and no legislation will make a man have more presence of mind, or, I believe, make him more cautious; and besides that, the next time such an accident occurs, the circumstances will be so different, that the instructions given to the men, in consequence of the former accident, will not apply.

We look at death through the cheap-glazed windows of the flesh, and believe him the monster which the flawed and cracked glass represents him.

I don't understand a belief that there is an invisible being in the sky who watches over us all the time and keeps score and who throws you in a burning pit. I think that's very limiting, very antihuman. It's the way they devised for helping to control people because if they can make you believe in an invisible man who's going to hurt you later, they can make you believe anything!

That's all religion is -- some principle you believe in . . . man has accomplished far more miracles than the God he invented. What a tragedy it is to invent a God and then suffer to keep him King.

There is much less envy of the rich by the poor than there is of the happy by the unhappy; by those who believe, by those who don't believe.

I do not believe that I am a perfectionist one bit. I truly believe that perfection is something that no one can achieve.

I am of the opinion that there are artists and non-artists. I think that this is the way it always was and always will be. I do not believe that we are in the center of the world. It is possible that there are gods who do not relate to human. As an artist, I believe that it is possible to depict these forces.

I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey. I believe that whenever a human being, of even the highest intelligence and culture, delivers an opinion upon a matter apart from his particular and especial line of interest, training and experience, it will always be an opinion of so foolish and so valueless a sort that it can be depended upon to suggest to our Heavenly Father that the human being is another disappointment and that he is no considerable improvement upon the monkey.

In the long run our boasted control of nature is a delusion.

Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.

We believe as much as we can. We would believe everything if we could.

However baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.

If people believe the world is here to satisfy them, whenever they begin to encounter their limitations, they become unhappy.

You are unhappy because you believe in such a thing as happy.