Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.
E. M. ForsterRead
What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?
Interpretation
Nature's beauty has little value if it isn't appreciated in our everyday lives.
E. M. Forster emphasizes the significance of nature in our daily existence, suggesting that the beauty of stars, trees, and natural phenomena like sunrise and wind is meaningless if we do not allow them to enrich our lives. He advocates for a deeper connection with the natural world, encouraging us to find joy and inspiration in the physical environment around us as part of our routine experiences.
In practice
In a speech about environmental conservation, one could quote Forster to emphasize the importance of nature in our lives.
Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
Oxford is Oxford: not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another.
The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilization, something less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely tolerance.
One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.
Mother, mother ocean, I have heard you call. Wanted to sail upon your waters, since I was three feet tall. You've seen it all, you've seen it all. Watched the men who rode you, switch from sails to steam. In your belly, you hold the treasure that few have ever seen, most of them dreams, most of them dreams.
To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.
Nature reaches out to us with welcoming arms, and bids us enjoy her beauty; but we dread her silence and rush into the crowded cities, there to huddle like sheep fleeing from a ferocious wolf.
Animals are our younger brothers and sisters, also on the ladder of evolution but a few rungs lower. It is an important part of our responsibilities to help them in their ascent, and not to retard their development by cruel exploitation of their helplessness.
Environmental justice [means that] no community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less environmental benefits than any other.
Nature in her unfathomable designs had mixed us of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two things hang indubitably together and determine each other's being but how or why, no mortal may ever know.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.