Love Is Mightier than Death

‘Love is mightier than death’, wrote Maupassant in one of his novels. Love is not, though, everything in the world that is mightier than death. Imagine a patient suffering from typhus, for example, eats a biscuit and dies a predictable death. This shows that appetite, too, is one thing that is mightier than death. Putting aside appetite, we can count lots of these: patriotism, religious conversion, humanitarianism, greed, reputation, criminal instinct, and more ― there must be still many more that are mightier than death. That is to say, every passion for something would be mightier than death. (Naturally, passion for death itself is an exception.) And we might be called careless if we asserted that love is, among things as such, particularly stronger than death. Even when it appears to be mightier than death, we are, in fact, often controlled by something that Frenchmen call Bovarism. It is a form of sentimentalisme, where we fancy ourselves to be lovers in romance novels.