Top 100 Guy De Maupassant Quotes
#2. Her name was Marroca, probably her maiden name, and she pronounced it as though it had fifteen r's in it.
Guy De Maupassant
#4. One sometimes weeps over one's illusions with as much bitterness as over a death.
Guy De Maupassant
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Any government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck.
[On Water]
Guy De Maupassant
#8. 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 air, we hold it in ourselves as we hold our thoughts. Nothing more exists for us.
Guy De Maupassant
#9. The essence of life is the smile of round female bottoms, under the shadow of cosmic boredom.
Guy De Maupassant
#10. And I gazed at these forms incomprehensible to me, but which revealed the immortal thoughts of the greatest shatterer of dreams who had ever dwelt on earth.
Guy De Maupassant
#11. I should add that there are undoubtedly charming Englishmen; I have often met them. But they are rarely our fellow-guests at hotels.
Guy De Maupassant
#12. 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
#13. Language dazzles and deceives because it is masked by faces, because we see it emerging from the lips, because lips please and eyes beguile. But words on paper, black on white, reveal the naked soul.
Guy De Maupassant
#14. But he asked himself now if he would not be disobeying God. And does not God permit love, since He surrounds it with such visible splendor?
Guy De Maupassant
#15. I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt.
[As quoted in Pol Neveux's introduction, Guy De Maupassant: A Study]
Guy De Maupassant
#16. Monsieur Lerebour was short, round and jovial, with the joviality of a shopkeeper who liked to do himself well. His wife, who was thin, self-willed and perpetually discontented, had still not succeeded in overcoming her husband's good humour.
Guy De Maupassant
#17. The love between man and woman is a voluntary pact in which the one who falls short is only guilty of perfidy, but when a woman has become a mother her duty is greater because nature has entrusted the human species to her. If she fails then she is a coward, unworthy and infamous.
Guy De Maupassant
#18. There was an undoubted affinity in his mind between the two great passions of his life: revolution and good brew. The taste of one immediately brought to mind the other.
Guy De Maupassant
#20. Yet her heart did not thirst for emotions like the hearts of sentimental women; she was not searching for a man's unique love nor for the gratification of a passion. All she required was the admiration of every man she met, acknowledgment of capitulation, the homage of universal tenderness.
Guy De Maupassant
#21. Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.
Guy De Maupassant
#22. Travel, like dreams, is a door that opens from the real world into a world that is yet to be discovered
Guy De Maupassant
#23. It is not difficult to pass for being learned. The secret is not to betray your ignorance.
Guy De Maupassant
#24. They had moved closer to one another to watch the dying moments of the day, this beautiful bright May day.
Guy De Maupassant
#25. 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
#26. Anguish of suspense made men even desire the arrival of enemies.
Guy De Maupassant
#27. At times it seemed to her that other people's hearts must have arms like their bodies, loving arms extended to clasp and hold - and her own heart? All it had was eyes, that heart of hers.
Guy De Maupassant
#28. There is a part of everything which is unexplored,
because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown.
Guy De Maupassant
#31. Breathing, sleeping, drinking, eating, working, dreaming, everything we do is dying. to live, in fact, is to die.
Guy De Maupassant
#32. Of all the passions, the only one that seems respectable to me is the passion for food
Guy De Maupassant
#33. Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck.
Guy De Maupassant
#35. Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.
Guy De Maupassant
#36. Every ideal comes from us as do all the amenities of life, in order to make our existence as simple reproducers, for which divine Providence solely intended us, less monotonous and less hard.
Guy De Maupassant
#37. A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.
Guy De Maupassant
#38. < ... > out of love of symmetry, just as people put two vases above a fireplace.
Guy De Maupassant
#39. The matter had to be settled immediately, without delaying another day, for at times he too felt an imperious need for instant solutions, which is all the weak are capable of, given their inability to sustain an effort of will.
Guy De Maupassant
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. Envy, bitter envy, was permeating his soul drop by drop, like a poison that tainted all his pleasures and made his life hateful.
Guy De Maupassant
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Killing is decreed by law but nature loves eternal youth. Whatever she does, however unconscious and unfeeling the act, she seems to cry out: 'Quick! Quick! Quick!' And the more she destroys, the more she is renewed.
Guy De Maupassant
#48. We love our mother unknowingly, and only realize how deep-rooted that love is at the ultimate separation.
Guy De Maupassant
#50. He was a fat little man with short arms, short legs, a short neck, short nose, short everything in fact.
Guy De Maupassant
#51. 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
#52. The dead dog had come more than a hundred miles to find its master.
[Mademoiselle Cocotte]
Guy De Maupassant
#54. 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
#56. Solitude is obviously dangerous for people with active brains. We need men around us who have ideas and like talking. Leave us alone for any length of time, and we start filling the void with supernatural creatures.
Guy De Maupassant
#57. Then, as the priest was emerging somewhat uneasily from his lair, he went straight up to him, looked deep into his eyes, and growled into his face: 'If you weren't wearing skirts, what a punch I'd give you right on your ugly snout, wouldn't I just!
Guy De Maupassant
#58. 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
#59. It's not difficult to appear bright, don't worry. The main thing is never to show obvious ignorance of anything. You prevaricate, avoid the difficulty, steer clear of the problem and then catch other people out by using a dictionary. All men are stupid oafs and ignorant nincompoops.
Guy De Maupassant
#60. Ah! Those silly songs make us lose our heads; and, believe me, never marry a woman who sings in the country, especially if she sings the song of Musette!
Guy De Maupassant
#61. To contest an author's right to create a poetic or realistic work is to want to force him to change his temperament, challenge his originality, refuse to allow him to use the eye and the intelligence nature has given him.
Guy De Maupassant
#62. The glasses were half full, which meant that the guests were completely so
Guy De Maupassant
#63. She stayed there, in her ball dress, without strength to go to bed, overwhelmed, on a chair, without a fire, without a thought.
Guy De Maupassant
#64. But she shook with rage, and got up one of those conjugal scenes which make a peaceable man dread the domestic hearth more than a battlefield where bullets are raining.
Guy De Maupassant
#65. First my husband, then my parents died. After that I lost my two sisters. When death comes to someone's home it's as if it wants to get as much done as quickly as possible to save coming again for a long time.
Guy De Maupassant
#66. 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
#67. Certainly solitude is dangerous for active minds. We require around us men who can think and talk. When we are alone for a long time, we people space with phantoms.
Guy De Maupassant
#69. Those men, those of former times, had soul and eyes that in no way resemble ours, and in their veins, along with their blood, flowed something that has disappeared: love and admiration for the Beautiful.
Guy De Maupassant
#70. His life had gone by without adventures, without passions, almost without hopes. The facility of dreaming, planted in every man, had never blossomed in the narrow bed of his ambitions.
Guy De Maupassant
#71. Were a man to spend only one day in Sicily and ask, "What must one see?" I would answer him without hesitation, "Taormina." It is only a landscape, but a landscape where you find everything on earth that seems made to seduce the eyes, the mind and the imagination.
Guy De Maupassant
#72. We live always under the weight of the old and odious customs ... of our barbarous ancestors.
Guy De Maupassant
#73. What is the use of fine feelings when pitted against the power of instinct? And what chance does modest restraint have against that of natural desire?
Guy De Maupassant
#75. 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
#76. Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.
[My Uncle Sosthenes]
Guy De Maupassant
#77. It was one of those feminine faces whose every line has its own particular charm, and seems to possess a meaning, whose every movement seems to reveal or to conceal something.
Guy De Maupassant
#78. Is it not rather the touch of Love, of Love the Mysterious, who seeks constantly to unite two beings, who tries his strength the instant he has put a man and a woman face to face?
Guy De Maupassant
#79. This notary was a little man, completely round, round in every part. His head looked like a ball nailed onto another ball, supported by two legs that were so tiny and so short that they also closely resembled balls.
Guy De Maupassant
#80. The great artists are those who impose their personal vision upon humanity.
Guy De Maupassant
#81. 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
#82. But this pleasure was not unalloyed with pain, and it seemed as if the universal joy of the awakening world could now only impart a delight which was half sorrow to her grief-crushed soul and withered heart.
Guy De Maupassant
#83. Then, one by one, they went away, for night was falling on the storm, wrapping in shadows the raging ocean and all the battling elements.
Guy De Maupassant
#84. The day exhausts me, irritates me. It is brutal, noisy. I struggle to get out of bed, I dress wearily and, against my inclination, I go out. I find each step, each movement, each gesture, each word, each thought as tiring as if I were lifting a crushing weight.
Guy De Maupassant
#85. O sleep! ridiculous mystery which makes faces appear so grotesque, you are the revealer of human ugliness. You uncover all shortcomings, all deformities and all defects. You turn every face touched by you into a caricature.
Guy De Maupassant
#86. 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
#87. Institutionalised love always looks down on her more liberal sister
Guy De Maupassant
#89. He himself was one of your noisy roisterers, for whom life holds no greater pleasures than wine and bought women. Outside these two poles of existence, he understood nothing. Braggart, brawler, contemptuous of every living person, he despised the whole world from the heights of his ignorance.
Guy De Maupassant
#90. I think I have already told you that there are certain things which it is not necessary to discuss, and this is one of them.
Guy De Maupassant
#91. In the East men know panic, but they do not know what fright is.
Guy De Maupassant
#92. 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.
[On Water]
Guy De Maupassant
#94. 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
#95. I hope you realize that you really hit it off with the ladies? You must cultivate that. It could take you far.
Guy De Maupassant
#96. 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
#97. After all, life is never so jolly or so miserable as people seem to think.
Guy De Maupassant
#100. A terrible event had broken him down. He had fallen madly in love with a young girl and married her in a kind of dreamlike ecstasy. After a year of unalloyed bliss and unexhausted passion, she had died suddenly of heart disease, no doubt killed by love itself.
Guy De Maupassant
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