Top 100 Maupassant Quotes
#1. 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
#2. How were you supposed to feel when you adored the novels of Jules Verne, Maupassant, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Simenon and loads of others who then turned out to be complete bastards?
Jean-Michel Guenassia
#3. I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I've fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody's going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I'm crazy or I keep getting better.
Ernest Hemingway,
#4. Maupassant is a man of mitigating circumstances, the lawyer who can bring the jurors around by demonstrating that they too could have committed such a crime. We are all murderers.
Philippe Lejeune
#5. Mr. Arnold Bennett feels he has ranked himself for ever as a dry wine by what he mixed with himself of Maupassant; nevertheless he has put on the market some grocer's Sauterne in the form of several novels that are highly sentimental so far as their fundamental balance of values is concerned.
Rebecca West
#6. Some photographs are like a Chekhov short story or a Maupassant story. They're quick things and there's a whole world in them. But one is unconscious of it while shooting.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#7. I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.
Louis L'Amour
#8. However, in fetishism the desired object is displaced; and in this context ("The Apparition" by Guy De Maupassant) it is the desiring object, so to speak. In other words, have we ever seen a boot in love with a fetishist?
Philippe Lejeune
#10. Drink the sun's warmth and the moon's icy glitter, and taste that which the dead and the yet-to-be-born cannot: the potency of this world.
Emmanuelle De Maupassant
#11. Her name was Marroca, probably her maiden name, and she pronounced it as though it had fifteen r's in it.
Guy De Maupassant
#13. 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
#14. One sometimes weeps over one's illusions with as much bitterness as over a death.
Guy De Maupassant
#15. 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
#16. The past attracts me, the present frightens me, because the future is death.
Guy De Maupassant
#18. she feels still that grasp upon her ankle as if it were a circlet of iron: the embodiment of matrimony. She would be pinned, like the museum butterflies. He would remain free to flutter.
Emmanuelle De Maupassant
#19. Philippe-Auguste was an ugly child, with uncombed hair and dirt all over him, and the face of a cretin.
Guy De Maupassant
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. The essence of life is the smile of round female bottoms, under the shadow of cosmic boredom.
Guy De Maupassant
#24. An 'usband should be plain enough to sit at his settle, and simple-minded enough to accept the stew on his plate, rather than looking round ev'ry corner for a more succulent chop,' declares Elsie.
Emmanuelle De Maupassant
#25. Forsaking all other thoughts, he rutted into her, in a fashion more animal than human. His eruption he held fast within, so that she squirmed against the sensation before accepting her own fall into oblivion, her walls pulsing to an echoing rhythm.
from The Gentlemen's Club
Emmanuelle De Maupassant
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. It is better to be unhappy in love than unhappy in marriage, but some people manage to be both.
Guy De Maupassant
#32. 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
#34. 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
#35. You'll find that my coquetry is quite impartial, which allows me to keep my friends.
Guy De Maupassant
#36. 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
#37. Several sailors, sheltered behind the curved bottoms of their boats, were watching this battle of the sky and the sea.
Guy De Maupassant
#38. Crook your finger;
they'll come closer.
Pull the covers tighter to your chin;
in beside you they'll creep.
Emmanuelle De Maupassant
#41. 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
#42. Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.
Guy De Maupassant
#43. Travel, like dreams, is a door that opens from the real world into a world that is yet to be discovered
Guy De Maupassant
#44. It is not difficult to pass for being learned. The secret is not to betray your ignorance.
Guy De Maupassant
#45. They had moved closer to one another to watch the dying moments of the day, this beautiful bright May day.
Guy De Maupassant
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. Anguish of suspense made men even desire the arrival of enemies.
Guy De Maupassant
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#54. Breathing, sleeping, drinking, eating, working, dreaming, everything we do is dying. to live, in fact, is to die.
Guy De Maupassant
#55. Of all the passions, the only one that seems respectable to me is the passion for food
Guy De Maupassant
#56. Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck.
Guy De Maupassant
#58. Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.
Guy De Maupassant
#59. We are accustomed to use our eyes only with the memory of what other people before us have thought about the object we are looking at.
Guy De Maupassant
#60. 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
#61. A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.
Guy De Maupassant
#62. < ... > out of love of symmetry, just as people put two vases above a fireplace.
Guy De Maupassant
#63. Yes, this is the only good thing in life: love! To hold a woman you love in your arms! That is the ultimate in human happiness.
Guy De Maupassant
#65. 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
#66. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. True love in my view can only flourish in conditions where there is a mixture of freedom and constraint. An imposed love, sanctioned by law and blessed by a priest does not really seem the same thing at all
Guy De Maupassant
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#76. She is drawn to the river, and all its hideous, dead-eyed treasures: rot-bloated cats, and cold-meat corpses of unwanted infants, eels plucking at their tender fingers and toes.
Emmanuelle De Maupassant
#77. And involuntarily I compared the childish sarcasm, the religious sarcasm of Voltaire with the irresistible irony of the German philosopher whose influence is henceforth ineffaceable.
Guy De Maupassant
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. What do you want?" he then asked her. And with clenched teeth, and trembling with anger, she replied: "I want
I want you to marry me, as you promised." But he only laughed and replied: "Oh! if a man were to marry all the girls with whom he has made a slip, he would have more than enough to do.
Guy De Maupassant
#81. 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
#82. We love our mother unknowingly, and only realize how deep-rooted that love is at the ultimate separation.
Guy De Maupassant
#84. He was a fat little man with short arms, short legs, a short neck, short nose, short everything in fact.
Guy De Maupassant
#85. 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
#86. The dead dog had come more than a hundred miles to find its master.
[Mademoiselle Cocotte]
Guy De Maupassant
#87. 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
#88. He is a man-beast, carnivore incarnate, motivated by carnal avarice and wearing only the mask of civility.
She could sip from that cup.
It is his presumption that deters her: his belief that he has already caught Maud in his paw.
Emmanuelle De Maupassant
#89. You must - do you hear me, young man? - you must work more than you are doing!
Gustave Flaubert
#91. Listen,
listen with your eyes,
and your lips.
Listen with your skin,
and your blood.
Can you hear us,
at the edges?
Emmanuelle De Maupassant
#92. 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
#93. Yes, but I say that Nature is our enemy, that we must always fight against Nature, for she is continually bringing us back to an animal state. You may be sure that God has not put anything on this earth that is clean, pretty, elegant or accessory to our ideal; the human brain has done it.
Guy De Maupassant
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. She was pretty and, even more, she was smart, and she had a divine figure according to all accounts. He fell in love with her, as a man always falls in love with any attractive woman whom he sees a lot of.
Guy De Maupassant
#98. 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
#99. 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
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