Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.
E. M. ForsterRead
Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Life is a journey where we forget our beginnings and face an uncertain end.
E. M. Forster's quote reflects on the human experience as a journey marked by the paradox of forgetting our origins while being unable to comprehend our conclusions. It suggests that while we start life with a wealth of experiences that fade away from memory, we inevitably approach the end with anticipations that remain elusive and unfathomable, highlighting the transient and mysterious nature of existence.
Themes
LifeExperienceMemoryAnticipationExistence
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be used in a graduation speech to demonstrate the journey of life.
More from E. M. Forster
All quotes βA poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
E. M. ForsterRead
One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.
E. M. ForsterRead
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.
E. M. ForsterRead
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.
E. M. ForsterRead
One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.
E. M. ForsterRead
Similar quotes
Being precedes Truth, and ... Truth precedes the Good.
Josef PieperRead
We are confronted by the appearance of social institutions unintentionally created, vital for the welfare of society, which are not the result of reasoned planning
Carl MengerRead
I think one of the most important changes of our time has been our attitude to fear. Every civilisation defends itself by keeping fears out and saying 'we protect you from fear'. But it also produces new fears and throughout history people have changed the kind of fears which have worried them.
Theodore ZeldinRead
So long as you are still worried about what others think of you, you are owned by them. Only when you require no approval from outside yourself can you own yourself.
Neale Donald WalschRead
Great steps in human progress are made by things that don't work the way philosophy thought they should. If things always worked the way they should, you could write the history of the world from now on. But they don't, and it is those deviations from the normal that make human progress.
Charles KetteringRead
Iβm losing my taste for everything, including even my taste for finding everything tasteless.
Fernando PessoaRead