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.
I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world-present and in awe.
Truth exists, only falsehood has to be invented.
We discover that we do not know our role; we look for a mirror; we want to remove our make-up and take off what is false and real. But somewhere a piece of disguise that we forgot still sticks to us. A trace of exaggeration remains in our eyebrows; we do not notice that the corners of our mouth are bent. And so we walk around, a mockery and a mere half: neither having achieved being nor actors.
No true believer could be intolerant or a persecutor. If I were a magistrate and the law carried the death penalty against atheists, I would begin by sending to the stake whoever denounced another.
I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
The first thing to recognize not just about Afghanistan but about any poor undeveloped country is that as big as it looks on the map, it's much bigger when you're there.
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