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.
Interpretation
True love is an immense feeling that cannot be defined or altered; it encompasses all aspects of our existence.
In this quote, Guy De Maupassant expresses that love is a profound, indescribable force that permeates every part of our being. He suggests that love is not simply an emotion or a word, but rather a fundamental state of existence that embodies our physical, spiritual, and emotional dimensions. To love deeply means accepting the inadequacies inherent in love, as its essence cannot be fully articulated or confined to definitions, yet it remains the most significant element of life.
In practice
In a wedding speech to highlight the essence of love in a marriage.
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.
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.
We live always under the weight of the old and odious customs... of our barbarous ancestors.
You are mysterious, I love you. You’re beautiful, intelligent, and virtuous, and that’s the rarest known combination.
It is the special quality of love not to be able to remain stationary, to be obliged to increase under pain of diminishing.
Love is sweet, dearest Ned, but it cannot change a man's nature. -- Lyanna
I loved you so much once. I did. More than anything in the whole wide world. Imagine that. What a laugh that is now. Can you believe it? We were so intimate once upon a time I can't believe it now. The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can't imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else. I haven't been.
My heart went cold and only hollow rhythms resounded from within, but then he rose, brilliant as the moon in full and sank in the burrows of my keep, and all my armor, falling down, in a pile at my feet.
Well, my dear, take heart. Some day, I will kiss you and you will like it. But not now, so I beg you not to be too impatient.
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