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.
When you are in love, things make even more sense, he thought.
Suffering can become a means to greater love and greater generosity.
Well, here he was. They could save each other, the way the poets promised lovers should. He was mystery, he was darkness, he was all she had dreamed of. And if she would only free him he would service her - oh yes - until her pleasure reached that threshold that, like all thresholds, was a place where the strong grew stronger, and the weak perished. Pleasure was pain there, and vice versa. And he knew it well enough to call it home.
In love, you have loosened yourself like seawater
Love conquers in the long run. It won't do to become impatient - wait, wait - patience is bound to give success. . . .
At that moment of love, a moment when passion is absolutely silent under omnipotence of ecstasy, Marius, pure seraphic Marius, would have been more capable of visiting a woman of the streets than of raising Cosette’s dress above the ankle. Once on a moonlit night, Cosette stopped to pick up something from the ground, her dress loosened and revealed the swelling of her breasts. Marius averted his eyes.
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