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.
Whatever crushes individuality is despotism.
When you look at yourself from a universal standpoint, something inside always reminds or informs you that there are bigger and better things to worry about.
The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering.
We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.
Equality and prosperity shouldn't be seen as enemies of each other, but as partners. One reinforces the other.
I have to confess that I had gambled on my soul and lost it with heroic insouciance and lightness of touch. The soul is so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes such a nuisance, that I felt no more emotion on losing it than if, on a stroll, I had mislaid my visiting card.
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