— Great Expectations (1861), Chapter 29
About this quote
हिन्दी में
मैंने उसे तर्क के विरुद्ध चाहा, हर अच्छी संभावना के विरुद्ध, अपने चैन के विरुद्ध, आशा के विरुद्ध, अपनी ख़ुशी के विरुद्ध, और हर उस बात के विरुद्ध जो मुझे रोक सकती थी।
What it means
Read it as a ledger and only one column is filled. Reason, promise, peace, hope, happiness — these are the costs, and the sentence never names a single thing on the other side. It does not say she was worth it, or that the love gave him anything. ‘Against promise’ is the coldest item: not a broken vow but the abandonment of any likely good outcome.
The popular use of this line, on cards and captions, is as a romantic boast. As written it is a confession, and the escalation gives it away — it ends at happiness, admitting the love was not even aimed at being happy. The verb is also past tense, spoken by a man who already knows how it turned out and still declines to defend it.
What it teaches you
The useful trick here is the ledger. When you describe an attachment — yours or someone else’s — count how many clauses name a cost and how many name a benefit. If, like Pip, you can list six of the first and none of the second, you have already made the assessment; the only thing left is whether you say it out loud in those terms.
अर्थ और सीख
यह वाक्य प्रेम की तारीफ़ नहीं, बल्कि उसके नुक़सानों की सूची है — तर्क, संभावना, चैन, आशा, ख़ुशी, सब एक तरफ़, और दूसरी तरफ़ कुछ भी नहीं गिनाया गया। इसे प्रेम-घोषणा की तरह उद्धृत किया जाता है, पर यह असल में एक स्वीकारोक्ति है। सीख यह है कि अपने लगाव के बारे में जो वाक्य आप ख़ुद से कहते हैं, उसमें गिनिए कि लाभ का ज़िक्र कहीं है या नहीं।
Where it comes from
Pip on Estella, refusing every reasonable argument against loving her. The repetition of ‘against’ is the whole device — six clauses, each one a defence he has already tried and abandoned.
Dickens is not endorsing this. The novel is fairly clear that the attachment is destructive. But he gives Pip the honesty to describe it exactly, which is rarer in fiction than the feeling itself.
