Guy de Maupassant Short Quotes

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History, that excitable and lying old lady.

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

Guy de Maupassant
Legitimized love always despises its easygoing brother.

Guy de Maupassant
Let them respect my convictions, and I will respect theirs!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
Breathing, sleeping, drinking, eating, working, dreaming, everything we do is dying. To live, in fact, is to die.

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
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
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
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
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
What would have happened if she had not lost that necklace? Who knows? who knows? How strange and changeful is life! How small a thing is needed to make or ruin us!

Guy de Maupassant
Conversation... is the art of never appearing a bore, of knowing how to say everything interestingly, to entertain with no matter what, to be charming 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
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
That was perhaps the only woman I have ever loved — no — that I ever should have loved. Ah, well! who can tell? Circumstances rule one. And then — and then — all passes.

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
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
No one looked at her, no one thought of her. She felt herself swallowed up in the scorn of these virtuous creatures, who had first sacrificed, then rejected her as a thing useless and unclean.

Guy de Maupassant
I took the book from him reverently, 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
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
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