Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.

Forster’s line frames courage not as an optional virtue but as a defining condition of a fully lived human existence. “Life” here means more than biological survival: it implies moral and emotional engagement—risking rejection, loss, or failure in order to love, to act on principle, or to face uncomfortable truths. The alternative is a kind of living death: a cautious, self-protective existence so governed by fear that it forfeits the qualities that make life meaningful. The aphoristic either/or structure intensifies the claim, suggesting that without courage, what remains may be mere endurance rather than life in any richer sense.