Guy de Maupassant Quotes

Envy, bitter envy, was permeating his soul drop by drop, like a poison that tainted all his pleasure...

Everything I see reminds me that in a few days I shall no longer see it... It's horrible... I shall ...

In fact living is dying.

It was one of those bitter mornings when the whole of nature is shiny, brittle, and hard, like cryst...

He seemed to have established in his mind an affinity between the two great passions of his life – p...

Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people sho...

Any government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipw

Is it not rather the touch of Love, of Love the Mysterious, who seeks constantly to unite two beings...

I told myself: 'I am surrounded by unknown things.' I imagined man without ears, suspecting the exis...

...A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise...

I told myself 'Everything is a being! The shout that passes into the air is an entity like an animal...

Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.

It was then between one o'clock in the morning and half-past that hour; the sky soon cleared a bit b...

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

Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think ...

When the first fine spring days come, and the earth awakes and assumes its garment of verdure, when ...

Why not other elements besides fire, air, earth and water? There are four of them, just four, those ...

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

How fathomless the mystery of the Unseen is! We cannot plumb its depths with our feeble senses - wit...

You have the army of mediocrities followed by the multitude of fools. As the mediocrities and the fo...

There is a part of everything which is unexplored,because we are accustomed to using our eyes only i...

I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunder

The great artists are those who impose their personal vision upon humanity.

But a vague jealousy, one of those dormant jealousies that develop between brothers or sisters almos...

There were some children round him playing in the dust on the paths. They had long fair hair, and wi...

Yes, but I say that Nature is our enemy, that we must always fight against Nature, for she is contin...

They were so absorbed in their plotting that they did not hear Boule de Suif return. But the Comte's...

There are some delightful places in this world which have a sensual charm for the eyes. One loves th...

The love between man and woman is a voluntary pact in which the one who falls short is only guilty o...

It is man who has introduced a little grace, beauty, unknown charm and mystery into creation by sing...

I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing.

Great minds that are healthy are never considered geniuses, while this sublime qualification is lavi...

A human being - what is a human being? Everything and nothing. Through the power of thought it can m...

Broad daylight does not encourage the apprehension of horror.

Every ideal comes from us as do all the amenities of life, in order to make our existence as simple ...

Nevertheless man has found love, which is not a bad reply to that sly Deity, and he has adorned it w...

Patriotism is a kind of religion it is the egg from which wars are hatched.

Do you know how I picture God myself?" he said. "As an enormous, creative organ beyond our ken, who ...

Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exis...

It is the encounters with people that make life worth living.

I love the night passionately. I love it as I love my country, or my mistress, with an instinctive, ...

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

Get black on white.

I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing

Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched."]

...perhaps, also this short embrace may infuse in their veins a little of this thrill which they wou...

If I could, I would stop the passage of time. But hour follows on hour, minute on minute, each secon...

The human mind is a lucky little local, passing accident which was totally unforeseen, and condemned...

Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It's the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything wit...

Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the...

Patriotism is a kind of religion it is the egg from which wars are hatched.

What you love too violently finishes by killing you.

We are, on earth, two distinct races. Those who have need of others, whom others amuse, engage sooth...

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

She was no longer the fair-haired, colourless girl whom I had seen at the church fifteen years befor...

Nature loves death: she will not punish it.

He himself was one of your noisy roisterers, for whom life holds no greater pleasures than wine and ...

O sleep! ridiculous mystery which makes faces appear so grotesque, you are the revealer of human ugl...

For some years he had felt weighing on him the burden of loneliness which sometimes overwhelms old b...

Some people never have any luck. All at once, as though a thick veil had been whisked aside, he clea...

Madame Chantal―a large woman whose ideas always strike me as being square-shaped, like stones dresse...

I am lost! Someone has taken over my mind and is controlling it! Someone is in command of all my act...

There were office-worn gents with yellow faces, bent backs, and one shoulder set slightly higher tha...

Daylight does not lend itself to terror: objects and people are plain to see; and we encounter there...

Solitude is obviously dangerous for people with active brains. We need men around us who have ideas ...

There was an undoubted affinity in his mind between the two great passions of his life: revolution a...

She thought constantly about Paris and avidly read all the society pages in the papers. Their accoun...

Language dazzles and deceives because it is masked by faces, because we see it emerging from the lip...

By nature independent, gay, even exuberant, seductively responsive and given to those spontaneous sa...

Why is it a shame for me to cause them to die and try to exterminate them, tell me? You did not talk...

The only certainty is death.

Get married, my friend, you don't know what it means to live alone, at my age. Nowadays feeling alon...

Yes, this is the only good thing in life: love! To hold a woman you love in your arms! That is the u...

Life is a slope. As long as you're going up you're always looking towards the top and you feel happy...

Killing is decreed by law but nature loves eternal youth. Whatever she does, however unconscious and...

The past attracts me, the present frightens me, because the future is death.

Madeleine in her turn stared at him steadily, straight into his eyes, in a profound, strange way, as...

After all, life is never so jolly or so miserable as people seem to think.

I had kissed her at odd times, in out of the way corners, in the manner of a mountain guide, nothing...

I have an immoderate passion for water; for the sea, though so vast, so restless, so beyond one's co...

....and I gazed at these forms incomprehensible to me, but which revealed the immortal thoughts of t...

And involuntarily I compared the childish sarcasm, the religious sarcasm of Voltaire with the irresi...

The kiss itself is immortal. It travels from lip to lip, century to century, from age to age. Men an...

Night was a very different matter. It was dense, thicker than the very walls, and it was empty, so b...

We are all very much alike in France in this respect; we still remain knights, knights of love and f...

Military men are the scourges of the world.