breathing, sleeping, drinking, eating, working, dreaming, everything we do is dying. to live, in fact, is to die.
Interpretation
Life is a continuous cycle of actions that ultimately lead to death, and to truly live is to accept this truth.
This quote by Guy De Maupassant highlights the intrinsic connection between life and death, suggesting that every action we take—breathing, sleeping, eating, and working—is part of a journey towards our inevitable mortality. It provokes deep reflection on the nature of existence, compelling us to consider how our daily pursuits inform our understanding of life and death, ultimately leading us to acknowledge that embracing life means recognizing the reality of death as a part of it.
In practice
In a motivational speech about embracing life’s challenges, one might say this quote to emphasize acceptance of our mortality.
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.
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.
We live always under the weight of the old and odious customs... of our barbarous ancestors.
The law given from Sinai was a civil and municipal as well as a moral and religious code; it contained many statutes . . . of universal application-laws essential to the existence of men in society, and most of which have been enacted by every nation which ever professed any code of laws.
All things are cause for either laughter or weeping.
If good things lasted forever, would we appreciate how precious they are?
A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others.
If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.
I don't want a moratorium on the death penalty. I want the abolition of it. I can't understand why a country [USA] that's so committed to human rights doesn't find the death penalty an obscenity.
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