"La vie est la suivante ou une suite des routes que nous ne prenons pas.'
Is this a standard french saying?
How is it translated?
What does it normally mean when someone says this?
What does it mean if someone says this to you when you have just said to them, I can't talk to you now, maybe later at such and such a time. (Is it telling me there might not be a later?"
Thanks for you help.
It doesn't actually make much sense as is. I mean "la vie est la suivante"?? This means "life is the next ..."
If you stick to "la vie est une suite de routes que nous ne prenons pas", it still doesn't make all that much sense and sounds to me like one of those new agey/Hallmark Cards sayings about roads not taken.
I couldn't tell you what the person who said this meant in the context you mention. Some kind of regret?
It sounds like the French equivalent of the English you see on Japanese T-shirts.
The speaker may be trying to say something like this.
Yes, it looks to me like this could be the work of an online translator.
Maybe "la suivante ou une suite" was actually a choice of two solutions to translate a word from the original language. In which case, the sentence should probably be, as bjd said, along the lines of "la vie est une suite de routes que nous ne prenons pas" (Life is a series of roads we do not take). Certainly not a standard French saying.
If it is indeed a translation, I wonder what the original language was.
Ah yes it would be an online translator. The thing is that the original version in English didn't make much sense to me either. The person who sent me the english version was french. I put it into a translator and got the above result.
It was - Life is a folowing or continuation of roads we do not take. Maybe he meant "flowing". anyway it all seems senseless.
but perhaps I should give you the whole message. I will come right back.
"do what you think is good . Life is a folowing or a continuation of roads which we do not take. Be confident."
The issue is that i felt it sounds negative. A bit like well you take your chances and risk not reconnecting. But i am starting to think I was wrong. Its largely because he chose to put it in the negative - roads we do not take, rather those we do.
I would think that life is a continuation of roads we do take.
I personally would have a hard time with someone who relies on t-shirt clichés to make their point.
I wouldn't read anything negative into it. The way I see it, he was probably just trying to give some non-committing but uplifting advice, something like "trust your own judgement, pick a road and don't look back": Maybe you'd expressed some uncertainty about life choices?
It would be funny if it turned out he'd used an online translator to come up with the English sentence before you fed it back into the machine to post it here, making it even more obscure. I agree with the others that the original sentence looks somehow cheesy anyway - like something my old aunt's calendar would have had, in pink cursive writing, over a picture of a forest path covered in moss and fallen leaves. But I'm sure he meant well.