Guy de Maupassant Quotes

51 Sourced Quotes

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
Life seemed to have stopped short; the shops were shut, the streets deserted. Now and then an inhabitant, awed by the silence, glided swiftly by in the shadow of the walls. The anguish of suspense made men even desire the arrival of the enemy.

Guy de Maupassant
Let us protest and let us be angry, let us be indignant, or let us be enthusiastic, Schopenhauer has marked humanity with the seal of his disdain and of his disenchantment.
A disabused pleasure-seeker, he overthrew beliefs, hopes, poetic ideals and chimeras, destroyed the aspirations, ravaged the confidence of souls, killed love, dragged down the chivalrous worship of women, crushed the illusions of hearts, and accomplished the most gigantic task ever attempted by scepticism. He spared nothing with his mocking spirit, and exhausted everything. And even today those who execrate him seem to carry in their own souls particles of his thought.

Guy de Maupassant
A man who looks a part has the soul of that part.

Guy de Maupassant
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
The count uttered several rather risky witticisms, but so tactfully were they said that his audience could not help smiling. Loiseau in turn made some considerably broader jokes, but no one took offence; and the thought expressed with such brutal directness by his wife was uppermost in the minds of all: "Since it's the girl's trade, why should she refuse this man more than another?"

Guy de Maupassant
At first no one spoke. Boule de Suif dared not even raise her eyes. She felt at once indignant with her neighbors, and humiliated at having yielded to the Prussian into whose arms they had so hypocritically cast her.

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

Guy de Maupassant
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
I was hard hit. I wanted to ask this little girl to marry me. If we had passed eight days together, I should have done so! How weak and incomprehensible a man sometimes is!

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

Guy de Maupassant
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
History, that excitable and lying old lady.

Guy de Maupassant
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
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
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
Legitimized love always despises its easygoing brother.

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

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

Guy de Maupassant
I have come to the conclusion that the bed comprehends our whole life; for we were bom in it, we live in it, and we shall die in it.

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

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

Guy de Maupassant