Daily Inspiration Quote by E. M. Forster

Forster’s question lands like a polite rebuke with teeth: nature’s grandeur is not the point if it remains wallpaper. Stars, trees, sunrise, wind: he stacks the staples of Romantic awe, then punctures the reverent pose with an impatient if. The sentence turns on “your” versus “our.” “Your” suggests a cultivated, museum-like appreciation owned by someone else - the tourist, the aesthete, the armchair idealist. “Our daily lives” insists on use, intimacy, and moral consequence. Beauty that doesn’t change how we live is, for Forster, just another form of class ornament.

The intent is practical without being anti-poetic. Forster wrote in a Britain where modernity was accelerating, empire was normalizing distance, and social life was governed by codes that prized restraint over connection. His fiction is crowded with people who “appreciate” art and landscape while failing to touch one another honestly. That’s the subtext here: we can praise sunsets and still treat people as disposable; we can romanticize the countryside while sustaining the machinery that makes most lives small. Nature becomes a test of whether feeling has any follow-through.

The line also anticipates Forster’s broader ethic - only connect - but shifts it outward. The natural world isn’t a separate sanctuary from “real life”; it’s an argument against the compartmentalization that lets us admire things abstractly and behave cruelly concretely. If sunrise doesn’t enter the day, it’s not sunrise, just scenery.