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This quote reflects on how we are influenced by outdated traditions and behaviors inherited from our ancestors.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This quote can be used in a discussion about the need for social reform and questioning outdated societal norms.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.
Human kind cannot bear much reality.
It occurs to me as I write that this "white light," usually presented dippily (evidence of afterlife, higher power), is in fact precisely consistent with the oxygen deficit that occurs as blood flow to the brain decreases. "Everything went white," those whose blood pressure has dropped say of the instant before they faint.
Introduce a little anarchy, upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. Iβm an agent of chaos, and you know the thing about chaos? It's fair.
The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of reality. Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process of adaptation certain principles, contained in brief formulas are endlessly repeated by the Press, the radio, the churches, and the schools, and by those kindly, sinister beings, the North American mothers and wives. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it he cannot grow or mature.
Modern liberalism, for most liberals is not a consciously understood set of rational beliefs, but a bundle of unexamined prejudices and conjoined sentiments. The basic ideas and beliefs seem more satisfactory when they are not made fully explicit, when they merely lurk rather obscurely in the background, coloring the rhetoric and adding a certain emotive glow.
I am only at home in the present.
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