Guy De Maupassant Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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

Of all the passions, the only one that seems respectable to me is the passion for food

It is the lives we encounter that make life worth living.

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.

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

Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck.

Whether we are describing a king, an assassin, a thief, an honest man, a prostitute, a nun, a young girl, or a stallholder in a market, it is always ourselves that we are describing.

I love the night passionately... I love it with all my senses: I love to see it, I love to breathe it in, I love to open my ears to its silence, I love my whole body to be caressed by its blackness.

We live always under the weight of the old and odious customs... of our barbarous ancestors.

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.

Abstinence is the worst form of perversion.

A lawful kiss is never worth as much as a stolen one.

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

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

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.

Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms

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.

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

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

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

There is only one good thing in life, and that is love.

Travel, like dreams, is a door that opens from the real world into a world that is yet to be discovered

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.

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

The simplest of women are wonderful liars who can extricate themselves from the most difficult dilemmas with a skill bordering on genius.

We breathe love as we breathe air; we hold it in ourselves as we hold our thoughts. Nothing more exists for us.

History, that excitable and unreliable old lady.

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.

The bed comprehends our whole life, for we were born in it, we live in it, and we shall die in it

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.

One sometimes weeps over one's illusions with as much bitterness as over a death.

Anguish of suspense made men even desire the arrival of enemies.

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.

I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing

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

To avoid each other, their eyes had developed an amazing mobility with all the cunning of enemies fearful of meeting each other head on.

Champagne... the wine of kings, the king of wines

You'll find that my coquetry is quite impartial, which allows me to keep my friends.

You must render: never report.

The English have only three sauces - a white one, a brown one and a yellow one, and none of them have any flavor whatever.

Military men are the scourges of the world.

In the East men know panic, but they do not know what fright is.

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.

Ale, not beer, in a pewter mug was comme il faut, the only thing for a gentleman of letters, worthy of the name, to drink.

To lie about a far country is easy

Love always has its price, come whence it may.