Home > Author > Guy de Maupassant

Guy de Maupassant QUOTES

1 " 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 , Bel-Ami

2 " A human being - what is a human being? Everything and nothing. Through the power of thought it can mirror everything it experiences. Through memory and knowledge it becomes a microcosm, carrying the world within itself. A mirror of things, a mirror of facts. Each human being becomes a little universe within the universe! "

― Guy de Maupassant

3 " There are some delightful places in this world which have a sensual charm for the eyes. One loves them with a physical love. We people who are attracted by the countryside cherish fond memories of certain springs, certain woods, certain ponds, certain hills, which have become familiar sights and can touch our hearts like happy events.
Sometimes indeed the memory goes back towards a forest glade, or a spot on a river bank or an orchard in blossom, glimpsed only once on a happy day, but preserved in our heart. "

― Guy de Maupassant , Selected Short Stories

4 " The only certainty is death. "

― Guy de Maupassant , Bel-Ami

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

― Guy de Maupassant , The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One

6 " In fact living is dying. "

― Guy de Maupassant , Bel-Ami

7 " Get black on white. "

― Guy de Maupassant

8 " 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

9 " Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare. "

― Guy de Maupassant

10 " I told myself: 'I am surrounded by unknown things.' I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me – afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptiness? "

― Guy de Maupassant , The Complete Works Of Guy De Maupassant (New Edition)

Guy de Maupassant QUOTES

11 " By nature independent, gay, even exuberant, seductively responsive and given to those spontaneous sallies that sparkle in the conversation of certain daughters of Paris who seem to have inhaled since childhood the pungent breath of the boulevards laden with the nightly laughter of audiences leaving theaters, Madame de Burne's five years of bondage had nonetheless endowed her with a singular timidity which mingled oddly with her youthful mettle, a great fear of saying too much, of going to far, along with a fierce yearning for emancipation and a firm resolve never again to compromise her freedom. "

― Guy de Maupassant , Alien Hearts

12 " 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 , The Complete Works Of Guy De Maupassant (New Edition)

13 " ....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 , The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One

14 " Nevertheless man has found love, which is not a bad reply to that sly Deity, and he has adorned it with so much poetry that woman often forgets the sensual part of it. Those among us who are unable to deceive themselves have invented vice and refined debauchery, which is another way of laughing at God and paying homage, immodest homage, to beauty. "

― Guy de Maupassant

15 " It is man who has introduced a little grace, beauty, unknown charm and mystery into creation by singing about it, interpreting it, by admiring it as a poet, idealizing it as an artist and by explaining it through science, doubtless making mistakes, but finding ingenious reasons, hidden grace and beauty, unknown charm and mystery in the various phenomena of Nature. God created only coarse beings, full of the germs of disease, who, after a few years of bestial enjoyment, grow old and infirm, with all the ugliness and all the want of power of human decrepitude. "

― Guy de Maupassant

16 " The human mind is a lucky little local, passing accident which was totally unforeseen, and condemned to disappear with this earth and to recommence perhaps here or elsewhere the same or different with fresh combinations of eternally new beginnings. We owe it to this little lapse of intelligence on His part that we are very uncomfortable in this world which was not made for us, which had not been prepared to receive us, to lodge and feed us or to satisfy reflecting beings, and we owe it to Him also that we have to struggle without ceasing against what are still called the designs of Providence, when we are really refined and civilized beings. "

― Guy de Maupassant

17 " 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

18 " 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 , The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One

19 " Nature loves death: she will not punish it. "

― Guy de Maupassant ,

20 " 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 , The Guy de Maupassant Megapack: 144 Novels and Short Stories