Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger.
E. M. ForsterRead
There lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer.
Interpretation
Every belief system carries the potential for suffering and sacrifice that its adherents may eventually have to confront.
E. M. Forster's quote highlights the notion that behind every creed or belief, there exists a profound and often challenging truth that could demand significant personal sacrifice from its followers. This acknowledgment reflects the complex relationship between belief and personal experience, reminding us that devotion often comes with hardships and the possibility of suffering.
In practice
In a discussion about religious commitments during a seminar.
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.
Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavoured and colored and put into cans.
Climbing is not a competition, and you cannot talk in terms of 'greatest,' it means nothing.
Rhodora! If the sages ask thee why This charm is wasted on the earth and sky, Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.
All rational action is in the first place individual action. Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons. Only the individual acts.
A junky runs on junk time. When the junk is cut off, the clock runs down and stops. All he can do is hang on and wait for non-junky time to start. A sick junky has no escape from external time, no place to go. He can only wait.
History has its truth; and so has legend hers.
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