Guy de Maupassant famous quotes

Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Life #White #Soul

A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Sick #Fever #Body

The past attracts me, the present frightens me, because the future is death.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Fear #Past

There is only one good thing in life, and that is love.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Good Things #Good Things In Life

Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#War #Eggs #Political

Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governments.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Government #People #Politics

You have the army of mediocrities followed by the multitude of fools. As the mediocrities and the fools always form the immense majority, it is impossible for them to elect an intelligent government.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Army #Intelligent #Government

Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Doubt #Doubtful

I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Meteors #Thunderbolts

...A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Dream #Art #Strange

To love very much is to love inadequately; we love-that is all. Love cannot be modified without being nullified. Love is a short word but it contains everything. Love means the body, the soul, the life, the entire being. We feel love as we feel the warmth of our blood, we breathe love as we breathe the air, we hold it in ourselves as we hold our thoughts. Nothing more exists for us. Love is not a word; it is a wordless state indicated by four letters.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Love #Mean #Air

The great artists are those who impose their personal vision upon humanity.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Art #History #Humanity

I love the night passionately. I love it as I love my country, or my mistress, with an instinctive, deep, and unshakeable love. I love it with all my senses: I love to see it, I love to breathe it in, I love to open my ears to its silence, I love my whole body to be caressed by its blackness. Skylarks sing in the sunshine, the blue sky, the warm air, in the fresh morning light. The owl flies by night, a dark shadow passing through the darkness; he hoots his sinister, quivering hoot, as though he delights in the intoxicating black immensity of space.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Country #Morning #Dark

There is only one good thing in life, and that is love. And how you misunderstand it! how you spoil it! You treat it as something solemn like a sacrament, or something to be bought, like a dress.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Dresses #Good Things #Treats

Great minds that are healthy are never considered geniuses, while this sublime qualification is lavished on brains that are often inferior but are slightly touched by madness.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Healthy #Brain #Mind

Whether we are describing a king, an assassin, a thief, an honest man, a prostitute, a nun, a young girl, or a stallholder in a market, it is always ourselves that we are describing.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Girl #Kings #Writing

History, that excitable and unreliable old lady.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#History #Old Lady

It is better to be unhappy in love than unhappy in marriage, but some people manage to be both.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#People #Unhappy #Unhappy Marriage

A human being - what is a human being? Everything and nothing. Through the power of thought it can mirror everything it experiences. Through memory and knowledge it becomes a microcosm, carrying the world within itself. A mirror of things, a mirror of facts. Each human being becomes a little universe within the universe!
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Memories #Mirrors #Littles

The essence of life is the smile of round female bottoms, under the shadow of cosmic boredom.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Blessing #Essence #Boredom

She realized for the first time that two people can never reach each others deepest feelings and instincts, that they spend their lives side by side, linked it may be, but not mingled, and that each one's inmost being must go through life eternally alone.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Two #People #Feelings

Life is a slope. As long as you're going up you're always looking towards the top and you feel happy, but when you reach it, suddenly you can see the road going downhill and death at the end of it all. It's slow going up and quick going down.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Long #Life Is #Ends

You've never lived until you've almost died. For those who have fought for it, life has a flavor the protected shall never know.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Soldier #Flavor

It is the lives we encounter that make life worth living.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Encounters #Life Worth Living

Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It's the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Art #Bored #Touching

Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Memories #Perfect #Giving

Anguish of suspense made men even desire the arrival of enemies.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Men #Enemy #Desire

There are some delightful places in this world which have a sensual charm for the eyes. One loves them with a physical love. We people who are attracted by the countryside cherish fond memories of certain springs, certain woods, certain ponds, certain hills, which have become familiar sights and can touch our hearts like happy events. Sometimes indeed the memory goes back towards a forest glade, or a spot on a river bank or an orchard in blossom, glimpsed only once on a happy day, but preserved in our heart.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Memories #Spring #Heart

If I could, I would stop the passage of time. But hour follows on hour, minute on minute, each second robbing me of a morsel of myself for the nothing of tomorrow. I shall never experience this moment again.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Tomorrow #Moments #Hours

Broad daylight does not encourage the apprehension of horror.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Doe #Daylight #Horror

Night was a very different matter. It was dense, thicker than the very walls, and it was empty, so black, so immense that within it you could brush against appalling things and feel roaming and prowling around a strange, mysterious horror.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Wall #Night #Black

And taking her friend’s hand, she put it on her breast, on that firm round covering of a woman’s heart which the male often finds so satisfying that he makes no attempt to find what lies beneath it.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Lying #Heart #Hands

I said, 'If other beings besides us exist on Earth, why didn't we meet them a long time ago?
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Long #Earth #Said

Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Peace #War #Government

The kiss itself is immortal. It travels from lip to lip, century to century, from age to age. Men and women garner these kisses, offer them to others and then die in turn.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Kissing #Men #Age

The simplest of women are wonderful liars who can extricate themselves from the most difficult dilemmas with a skill bordering on genius.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Lying #Liars #Skills

We live always under the weight of the old and odious customs... of our barbarous ancestors.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Weight #Politics #Ancestor

The bed comprehends our whole life, for we were born in it, we live in it, and we shall die in it
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Bed #Born #Whole Life

The English have only three sauces - a white one, a brown one and a yellow one, and none of them have any flavor whatever.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Yellow #White #Three

Whatever you want to say, there is only one word to express it, only one verb to give it movement, only one adjective to qualify it.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Writing #Giving #Adjectives

I told myself 'Everything is a being! The shout that passes into the air is an entity like an animal, since it is born, produces a movement, and is again transformed, in order to die. So the fearful mind that believes in incorporeal beings is not wrong. What are they?
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Believe #Animal #Order

Military men are the scourges of the world.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Military #Men #World

War! When I but think of this word, I feel bewildered, as though they were speaking to me of sorcery, of the Inquisition, of a distant, finished, abominable, monstrous, unnatural thing. When they speak to us of cannibals, we smile proudly, as we proclaim our superiority to these savages. Who are the real savages? Those who struggle in order to eat those whom they vanquish, or those who struggle merely to kill?
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Real #War #Struggle

Of all the passions, the only one that seems respectable to me is the passion for food
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Passion #Respectable

Sometimes our thoughts turn back toward a corner in a forest, or the end of a bank, or an orchard powdered with flowers, seen but a single time on some happy day, yet remaining in our hearts and leaving in soul and body an unappeased desire which is not to be forgotten, a feeling that we have just rubbed elbows with happiness.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Happiness #Flower #Heart

A man forced to spend his life without ever having the right, without ever finding the time, to shut himself up all alone, no matter where, to think, to reflect, to work, to dream? Ah! my dear boy, a key, the key of a door which one can lock this is happiness, mark you, the only happiness!
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Dream #Boys #Men

Love is always love, come whence it may. A heart that beats at your approach, an eye that weeps when you go away are things so rare, so sweet, so precious that they must never be despised.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Sweet #Heart #Eye

Legitimized love always despises its easygoing brother.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Brother #Despise

There are in France some fifty thousand young men of good birth and fairly well off who are encouraged to live a life of complete idleness. They must either cease to exist or must come to see that there can be no happiness, no health even, without regular daily labor of some sort ... The need of work is in me.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Men #Needs #Fifty

In the East men know panic, but they do not know what fright is.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Men #East #Panic

I go to bed, and I wait for sleep as a man might wait for the executioner. I wait for its coming with dread, and my heart beats and my legs tremble, while my whole body shivers beneath the warmth of the bedclothes, until the moment when I suddenly fall asleep, as a man throws himself into a pool of stagnant water in order to drown. I do not feel this perfidious sleep coming over me as I used to, but a sleep which is close to me and watching me, which is going to seize me by the head, to close my eyes and annihilate me.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Fall #Heart #Sleep

I have seen mad people, and I have known some who were quite intelligent, lucid, even clear-sighted in every concern of life, except on one point. They could speak clearly, readily, profoundly on everything; till their thoughts were caught in the breakers of their delusions and went to pieces there, were dispersed and swamped in that furious and terrible sea of fogs and squalls which is called MADNESS.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Intelligent #Fog #Sea

Love always has its price, come whence it may.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Love #May

I know nothing more enjoyable than that happy-go-lucky wandering life, in which you are perfectly free; without shackles of any kind, without care, without preoccupation, without thought even of to-morrow. You go in any direction you please, without any guide save your fancy.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Life #Lucky #Care

Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Thinking #Long #People

I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Taken #Pleasure

Champagne... the wine of kings, the king of wines
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Kings #Wine #Champagne

She was the temptress who had ensnared the first man, and who still continued her work at damnation; she was the being who is feeble, dangerous, mysteriously troubling. And even more than her body of perdition, he hated her loving soul.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Men #Soul #Firsts

breathing, sleeping, drinking, eating, working, dreaming, everything we do is dying. to live, in fact, is to die.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Dream #Drinking #Sleep

To avoid each other, their eyes had developed an amazing mobility with all the cunning of enemies fearful of meeting each other head on.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Eye #Enemy #Mobility

We breathe, sleep, drink, eat, work and then die! The end of life is death. What do you long for? Love? A few kisses and you will be powerless. Money? What for? To gratify your desires. Glory? What coems after it all? Death! Death alone is certain.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Sleep #Kissing #Long

One sometimes weeps over one's illusions with as much bitterness as over a death.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Bitterness #Sometimes #Illusion

In fact living is dying.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Dying #Facts

She was a sweet girl but not really pretty, a rough sketch of a woman with a little of everything in her, one of those silhouettes which artists draw in three strokes on the tablecloth in a café after dinner, between a glass of brandy and a cigarette. Nature sometimes turns out creatures like that.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Girl #Sweet #Artist

A lawful kiss is never worth as much as a stolen one.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Kissing #Stolen

Ale, not beer, in a pewter mug was comme il faut, the only thing for a gentleman of letters, worthy of the name, to drink.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Beer #Names #Gentleman

We breathe love as we breathe air; we hold it in ourselves as we hold our thoughts. Nothing more exists for us.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Air #Breathe

You'll find that my coquetry is quite impartial, which allows me to keep my friends.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Coquetry

Travel, like dreams, is a door that opens from the real world into a world that is yet to be discovered
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Dream #Real #Doors

I love the night passionately... I love it with all my senses: I love to see it, I love to breathe it in, I love to open my ears to its silence, I love my whole body to be caressed by its blackness...
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Night #Silence #Body

To lie about a far country is easy
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Country #Lying #Easy

The public is composed of numerous groups whose cry to us writers is: 'Comfort me.' 'Amuse me.' 'Touch my sympathies.' 'Make me sad.' 'Make me dream.' 'Make me laugh.' 'Make me shiver.' 'Make me weep.' 'Make me think.'
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Dream #Thinking #Laughing

I told myself: 'I am surrounded by unknown things.' I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me – afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptiness?
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Night #Men #Air

The glasses were half full, which meant that the guests were completely so
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Wine #Glasses #Half

The secret is not to betray your ignorance. Just maneuver, avoid the quicksands and obstacles, and the rest can be found in a dictionary.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Ignorance #Secret #Obstacles

You must render: never report.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Crafts

Whatever one wishes to say, there is one noun only by which to express it, one verb only to give it life, one adjective only which will describe it. One must search until one has discovered them, this noun, this verb, this adjective, and never rest content with approximations, never resort to trickery, however happy, or to vulgarism, in order to dodge the difficulty.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Order #Giving #Wish

The only certainty is death.
-- Guy de Maupassant

#Certainty