We had a discussion earlier on another SE site and I'm not able to find a definitive answer online. If I say, speaking generally:
The life is beautiful
I know this is not the common way of saying it and any people with a reasonably good English level will find that strange and prefer "Life is beautiful". But is this grammatically correct?
All online resources I checked about the "The" article give many examples and mention "It's not required", "not needed", "we usually don't use it" in such situation; but I failed to find a resource telling it's forbidden or a mistake.
Best Answer
Typically, when we say something is beautiful, we would not use a definite article if we are talking about an abstract noun:
Adding a definite article to any of those sentences would sound "off".
However, if we somehow qualify the noun, we can use the definite article:
I think we prefer to say things like, "It's not idiomatic" instead of, "It's a mistake" because we can often imagine a context where a sentence might work just fine, despite the fact that it sounds so unusual as a standalone sentence. For example, if we were to write something like this:
then the sentence sounds just fine. We are talking about a particular life (we might even say a particular way of life), not life in general, so the definite article actually helps get our meaning across.