We live always under the weight of the old and odious customs... of our barbarous ancestors.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on how we are influenced by outdated traditions and behaviors inherited from our ancestors.
Guy De Maupassant's quote suggests that modern society is burdened by the customs and practices of earlier generations, implying that these traditions may no longer serve a beneficial purpose. It evokes a sense of introspection about how we, as individuals and as a collective society, often adhere to antiquated ways of thinking and behaving that can hinder progress and understanding.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the need for social reform and questioning outdated societal norms.
Night was a very different matter. It was dense, thicker than the very walls, and it was empty, so black, so immense that within it you could brush against appalling things and feel roaming and prowling around a strange, mysterious horror.
To love very much is to love inadequately; we love-that is all. Love cannot be modified without being nullified. Love is a short word but it contains everything. Love means the body, the soul, the life, the entire being. We feel love as we feel the warmth of our blood, we breathe love as we breathe the air, we hold it in ourselves as we hold our thoughts. Nothing more exists for us. Love is not a word; it is a wordless state indicated by four letters.
breathing, sleeping, drinking, eating, working, dreaming, everything we do is dying. to live, in fact, is to die.
Whatever one wishes to say, there is one noun only by which to express it, one verb only to give it life, one adjective only which will describe it. One must search until one has discovered them, this noun, this verb, this adjective, and never rest content with approximations, never resort to trickery, however happy, or to vulgarism, in order to dodge the difficulty.
There is only one good thing in life, and that is love.
There is only one good thing in life, and that is love. And how you misunderstand it! how you spoil it! You treat it as something solemn like a sacrament, or something to be bought, like a dress.
The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him.
We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.
I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of ‘thinking’ and ‘enjoying’ what they call ‘living’, I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds.
I know no religion that destroys courtesy, civility, and kindness.
No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity.
For me, disability is a physical experience, but it's also a cultural experience and a social experience, and for me, the word 'crip' is the one that best encapsulated all of that.
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