"It is the lives we encounter that make life worth living"
About this Quote
A line like this sounds like consolation until you notice the quiet provocation inside it: Maupassant doesn’t praise love, faith, ambition, or even art. He praises collision. “The lives we encounter” implies friction, intrusion, the inconvenient fact of other people. Life isn’t redeemed by what we accomplish in isolation; it’s made “worth living” by contact - by being interrupted, altered, sometimes wounded by someone else’s story.
That’s very Maupassant. His fiction is packed with chance meetings: strangers on trains, soldiers in borrowed rooms, bourgeois couples watching their masks slip at dinner. Encounters are his narrative engine and his moral trap. You meet someone and suddenly your tidy self-concept looks flimsy; desire, class anxiety, and cruelty leak out. The sentence flatters human connection while admitting its cost. “Encounter” is not “cherish.” It can mean to run into, to confront, to be forced into proximity.
Context matters: Maupassant writes in a late-19th-century France obsessed with surfaces - respectability, marriage markets, the theater of social rank. In that world, an encounter is one of the few ways reality breaks through etiquette. It’s also a writer’s credo without the romance: characters aren’t born from pure imagination; they arrive via observation, overheard talk, a face glimpsed and never forgotten.
The subtext is almost cynical: meaning isn’t waiting inside you. It’s outsourced to other lives. That dependence is what keeps the sentence from becoming sentimental; it’s a reminder that solitude is a kind of aesthetic lie, and the plot only starts when someone else walks into the room.
That’s very Maupassant. His fiction is packed with chance meetings: strangers on trains, soldiers in borrowed rooms, bourgeois couples watching their masks slip at dinner. Encounters are his narrative engine and his moral trap. You meet someone and suddenly your tidy self-concept looks flimsy; desire, class anxiety, and cruelty leak out. The sentence flatters human connection while admitting its cost. “Encounter” is not “cherish.” It can mean to run into, to confront, to be forced into proximity.
Context matters: Maupassant writes in a late-19th-century France obsessed with surfaces - respectability, marriage markets, the theater of social rank. In that world, an encounter is one of the few ways reality breaks through etiquette. It’s also a writer’s credo without the romance: characters aren’t born from pure imagination; they arrive via observation, overheard talk, a face glimpsed and never forgotten.
The subtext is almost cynical: meaning isn’t waiting inside you. It’s outsourced to other lives. That dependence is what keeps the sentence from becoming sentimental; it’s a reminder that solitude is a kind of aesthetic lie, and the plot only starts when someone else walks into the room.
Quote Details
| Topic | Meaning of Life |
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