Famous Quotes & Sayings

Guy De Maupassant Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Guy De Maupassant.

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Famous Quotes By Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 745473

There are two races on earth. Those who need others, who are distracted, occupied and refreshed by others, who are worried, exhausted and unnerved by solitude as by the ascension of a terrible glacier or the crossing of a desert; and those, on the other hand, who are wearied, bored, embarrassed, utterly fatigued by others, while isolation calms them, and the detachment and imaginative activity of their minds bathes them in peace. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 701974

Then, as the priest was emerging somewhat uneasily from his lair, he went straight up to him, looked deep into his eyes, and growled into his face: 'If you weren't wearing skirts, what a punch I'd give you right on your ugly snout, wouldn't I just! — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1302541

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

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 423351

I have an immoderate passion for water; for the sea, though so vast, so restless, so beyond one's comprehension; for rivers, beautiful, yet fugitive and elusive; but especially for marshes, teeming with all that mysterious life of the creatures that haunt them. A marsh is a whole world within a world, a different world, with a life of its own, with its own permanent denizens, its passing visitors, its voices, its sounds, its own strange mystery. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1111191

I go to bed, and I wait for sleep as a man might wait for the executioner. I wait for its coming with dread, and my heart beats and my legs tremble, while my whole body shivers beneath the warmth of the bedclothes, until the moment when I suddenly fall asleep, as a man throws himself into a pool of stagnant water in order to drown. I do not feel this perfidious sleep coming over me as I used to, but a sleep which is close to me and watching me, which is going to seize me by the head, to close my eyes and annihilate me. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 604513

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

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 387217

Philippe-Auguste was an ugly child, with uncombed hair and dirt all over him, and the face of a cretin. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1245307

This notary was a little man, completely round, round in every part. His head looked like a ball nailed onto another ball, supported by two legs that were so tiny and so short that they also closely resembled balls. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1078771

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. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 880388

Solitude is obviously dangerous for people with active brains. We need men around us who have ideas and like talking. Leave us alone for any length of time, and we start filling the void with supernatural creatures. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 936575

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

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 346572

How fathomless the mystery of the Unseen is! We cannot plumb its depths with our feeble senses - with eyes which cannot see the infinitely small or the infinitely great, nor anything too close or too distant, such as the beings who live on a star or the creatures which live in a drop of water ... with ears that deceive us by converting vibrations of the air into tones that we can hear, for they are sprites which miraculously change movement into sound, a metamorphosis which gives birth to harmonies which turn the silent agitation of nature into song ... with our sense of smell, which is poorer than any dog's ... with our sense of taste, which is barely capable of detecting the age of a wine!
Ah! If we had other senses which would work other miracles for us, how many more things would we not discover around us! — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1687763

We love our mother unknowingly, and only realize how deep-rooted that love is at the ultimate separation. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 467282

She realized for the first time that two people can never reach each others deepest feelings and instincts, that they spend their lives side by side, linked it may be, but not mingled, and that each one's inmost being must go through life eternally alone. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 290972

The matter had to be settled immediately, without delaying another day, for at times he too felt an imperious need for instant solutions, which is all the weak are capable of, given their inability to sustain an effort of will. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 578251

For the first time, Duroy thought of all that was hidden in her past and began to speculate. Obviously she'd already had lovers, but what sort were they and what kind of society did they come from? A vague jealousy, a sort of hostility against her, stirred in him, an hostility directed against everything that he did not know about her, all that part of her feelings and life which did not belong to him. He looked at her, irritated by the secrets hidden in that pretty, silent little head, which perhaps at that very moment was thinking with regret of another man, of other men. How he would have liked to peer into her memories, explore them and learn all there was to know about them! — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 650622

We are all very much alike in France in this respect; we still remain knights, knights of love and fortune, since God has been abolished whose bodyguard we really were. But nobody can ever get woman out of our hearts; there she is, and there she will remain, and we love her, and shall continue to love her, and go on committing all kinds of follies on her account as long as there is a France on the map of Europe; and even if France were to be wiped off the map, there would always be Frenchmen left. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1787276

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

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 301335

Horrible, this love to which he was now chained, a love without purpose and without aim, without joy and without triumph, a love that sickened, weakened, laid waste to everything, a love without sweetness and without intoxication, breeding nothing but regret and foreboding, tears and pain, hinting at the ecstasy of shared caresses only by some intolerable longing for kisses not to be wakened on cold lips, sterile and dry as dead leaves. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1361721

I love the night passionately. I love it as I love my country, or my mistress, with an instinctive, deep, and unshakeable love. 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. Skylarks sing in the sunshine, the blue sky, the warm air, in the fresh morning light. The owl flies by night, a dark shadow passing through the darkness; he hoots his sinister, quivering hoot, as though he delights in the intoxicating black immensity of space. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 925079

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. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1582531

Did you ever sleep in a field of orange-trees in bloom? The air which one inhales deliciously is a quintessence of perfumes. This powerful and sweet smell, as savoury as a sweetmeat, seems to penetrate one, to impregnate, to intoxicate, to induce languor, to bring about a dreamy and somnolent torpor. It is like opium prepared by fairy hands and not by chemists. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1695996

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

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1683083

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

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1730732

Madeleine in her turn stared at him steadily, straight into his eyes, in a profound, strange way, as if seeking to read something there, as if seeking to discover there that hidden part of a human being which can never be fathomed but may perhaps be glimpsed for a fleeting instant, in those moments of unguardedness or surrender or inattention, that are like doors left ajar onto the mysterious depths of the spirit ... they stood for a few seconds, each gazing into the other's eyes, each striving to reach the impenetrable secret of the other's heart, to probe each other's thoughts to the quick. They tried, in a mute and passionate questioning, to see the other's conscience in its essential truth: the intimate struggles of two beings who, living side by side, never really know one another, who suspect and sniff around and spy on one another, but cannot plumb the miry depths of one another's soul. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1731379

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

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1626498

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

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1618526

He himself was one of your noisy roisterers, for whom life holds no greater pleasures than wine and bought women. Outside these two poles of existence, he understood nothing. Braggart, brawler, contemptuous of every living person, he despised the whole world from the heights of his ignorance. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1608528

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. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1582782

The love between man and woman is a voluntary pact in which the one who falls short is only guilty of perfidy, but when a woman has become a mother her duty is greater because nature has entrusted the human species to her. If she fails then she is a coward, unworthy and infamous. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1806107

Why does one love? How queer it is to see only one being in the world, to have only one thought in one's mind, only one desire in the heart, and only one name on the lips
a name which comes up continually, rising, like the water in a spring, from the depths of the soul to the lips, a name which one repeats over and over again, which one whispers ceaselessly, everywhere, like a prayer. — Guy De Maupassant

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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. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1547337

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

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I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1506427

First my husband, then my parents died. After that I lost my two sisters. When death comes to someone's home it's as if it wants to get as much done as quickly as possible to save coming again for a long time. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1481379

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

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1463242

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

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1439596

Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1988473

Yet her heart did not thirst for emotions like the hearts of sentimental women; she was not searching for a man's unique love nor for the gratification of a passion. All she required was the admiration of every man she met, acknowledgment of capitulation, the homage of universal tenderness. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 2268139

They were so absorbed in their plotting that they did not hear Boule de Suif return. But the Comte's whispered 'shh!' made them all look up. There she was. A sudden silence fell, and at first a feeling of embarrassment prevented them from speaking to her. At last, however, the Comtesse, more of an adept than the rest in social duplicity, asked her: 'Did you enjoy the christening? — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 2216163

For some years he had felt weighing on him the burden of loneliness which sometimes overwhelms old bachelors. He had been strong, active and cheerful, spending his days in sport, and his evenings in amusement. Now he was growing dull, and no longer took interest in anything. Exercise tired him, suppers and even dinners made him ill, while women bored him as much as they had once amused him. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 2186277

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

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 2177838

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

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 2157574

He stared fixedly at the opposite bank where an angler was fishing, his line perfectly still. All of a sudden the man jerked out of the water a little sliver fish which wriggled at the end of his line. Twisting and turning it this way and that he tried to extract his hook, but in vain. Losing patience he started pulling and, as he did so, tore out the entire bloody gullet of the fish with parts of its intestines attached. Paul shuddered, feeling himself equally torn apart. It seemed to him that the hook was like his own love and that if he were to tear it out he too would be gutted by a piece of curved wire hooked deep into his essential self at the end of a line held by Madeleine. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 2154111

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

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 2128871

Because it is useless, and I tell them so at once. If you had confessed your fears to me sooner, I would have reassured you. My dear friend, a man in love is not only foolish but dangerous. I cease all intercourse with people who love me or pretend to; firstly, because they bore me, and secondly, because I look upon them with dread, as I would upon a mad dog. I know that your love is only a kind of appetite; while with me it would be a communion of souls. Now, look me in the face - " she no longer smiled. "I will never be your sweetheart; it is therefore useless for you to persist in your efforts. And now that I have explained, shall we be friends? — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 2084621

The townsfolk in their darkened rooms were dazed as if by some cataclysm, some devastating earthquake, against which all wisdom and all resistance is of no avail. Such a feeling is produced every time the established order of things is upset, when security is destroyed and everything is hitherto protected by the laws of man or nature is suddenly at the mercy of wild unreasoning brutality. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 2040834

The public is composed of numerous groups whose cry to us writers is: 'Comfort me.' 'Amuse me.' 'Touch my sympathies.' 'Make me sad.' 'Make me dream.' 'Make me laugh.' 'Make me shiver.' 'Make me weep.' 'Make me think.' — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1988518

Perhaps, also this short embrace may infuse in their veins a little of this thrill which they would not have known without it, and will give to those two dead souls, brought to life in a second, the rapid and divine sensation of this intoxication, of this madness which gives to lovers more happiness in an instant than other men can gather during a whole lifetime. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1744043

He did not know how to make her understand that he would be happy, most happy, to become her husband in his turn. He certainly could not tell her that, now, at this moment, in this place, in the presence of this corpse; nevertheless he could, he believed, find one of those ambiguous, acceptable, complicated statements whose words have hidden significance, and which can, by their calculated reservations, express everything you intend. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1950591

She was simple, not being able to adorn herself, but she was unhappy, as one out of her class; for women belong to no caste, no race, their grace, their beauty and their charm serving them in place of birth and family. Their inborn finesse, their instinctive elegance, their suppleness of wit, are their only aristocracy, making some daughters of the people the equal of great ladies. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1916661

Those men, those of former times, had soul and eyes that in no way resemble ours, and in their veins, along with their blood, flowed something that has disappeared: love and admiration for the Beautiful. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1894129

Get married, my friend, you don't know what it means to live alone, at my age. Nowadays feeling alone fills me with appalling anguish; being alone at home, by the fire, in the evening. It seems to me then that I'm alone on the earth, dreadfully alone, but surrounded by indeterminate dangers, by unknown, terrible things; and the wall, which divides me from my neighbour, whom I do not know, separates me from him by as great a distance as that which separates me from the stars I see through my window. A kind of fever comes over me, a fever of pain and fear, and the silence of the walls terrifies me. It is so profound, so sad, the silence of the room in which you live alone. It isn't just a silence of the body, but a silence of the soul, and, when a piece of furniture creaks, a shiver runs through your whole body, for in that dismal place you expect to hear no sound. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1861134

It is the lives we encounter that make life worth living. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1847995

What is the use of fine feelings when pitted against the power of instinct? And what chance does modest restraint have against that of natural desire? — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1812811

At that moment we caught sight of a drunken man, reeling along at the far end of the street. With head thrust forward, arms dangling, and nerveless legs, he advanced towards us by short rushes of three, six, or ten rapid steps, followed by a pause. After a brief spasm of energy, he found himself in the middle of the street, where he stopped dead, swaying on his feet, hesitating between a fall and a fresh burst of activity. Suddenly he made off in a new direction. He ran up against a house, and clung to the wall as if to force his way through it. Then, with a start, he turned round, and gazed in front of him, open-mouthed, his eyes blinking in the sun. With a movement of the hips, he jerked his back away from the wall and continued on his way. A small yellow dog, a half-starved mongrel, followed him barking, halting when he halted, and moving when he moved.

'Look,' said Marambot, 'there's one of Madame Husson's Rose-kings'. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1233114

It is not difficult to pass for being learned. The secret is not to betray your ignorance. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1796840

I hope you realize that you really hit it off with the ladies? You must cultivate that. It could take you far. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1756398

Music, this complex and mysterious act, precise as algebra and vague as a dream, this art made out of mathematics and air, is simply the result of the strange properties of a little membrane. If that membrane did not exist, sound would not exist either, since in itself it is merely vibration. Would we be able to detect music without the ear? Of course not. Well, we are surrounded by things whose existence we never suspect, because we lack the organs that would reveal them to us. [Was He Mad?] — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1746058

Certainly solitude is dangerous for active minds. We require around us men who can think and talk. When we are alone for a long time, we people space with phantoms. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 596984

I am lost! Someone has taken over my mind and is controlling it! Someone is in command of all my actions, movements, and thoughts. I am nothing inside, merely a spectator enslaved and terrified by everything I do. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 940379

One sometimes weeps over one's illusions with as much bitterness as over a death. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 910706

Every authentically loved being is a kind of god. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 810561

But she shook with rage, and got up one of those conjugal scenes which make a peaceable man dread the domestic hearth more than a battlefield where bullets are raining. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 760619

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

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 739511

His life had gone by without adventures, without passions, almost without hopes. The facility of dreaming, planted in every man, had never blossomed in the narrow bed of his ambitions. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 683497

She was no longer the fair-haired, colourless girl whom I had seen at the church fifteen years before, but a stout, over-dressed lady, one of those ladies with no age, no character, no elegance, no wit, nor any of the attributes that constitute a woman. She was merely a mother, a fat, commonplace mother, the breeder, the human brood-mare, the procreating machine made of flesh, with no interests but her children and her cookery-book. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 656474

I reason everything out, and usually analyze my tastes too well to succumb to them blindly. And that's my chief defect, the real cause of my weakness. But this woman has taken possession of me in spite of myself, in spite of my fear and my knowledge of her; and she possesses me as if she had plucked out, one after the other, my every last aspiration. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 636688

At times it seemed to her that other people's hearts must have arms like their bodies, loving arms extended to clasp and hold - and her own heart? All it had was eyes, that heart of hers. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 609817

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

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 974495

She was at least seventy, tall, withered, and angular, with white hair arranged in old-fashioned sausage curls on her temples. She was dressed in the quaint and clumsy style of the wandering Englishwoman, like a person to whom clothes were a matter of complete indifference; she was eating an omelette and drinking water. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 563808

He had never regarded other men as anything but puppets of a sort, created to fill up an empty world. He divided them into two classes: those he greeted because some chance had put him in contact with them, and those he did not greet. But both these categories of individuals were equally insignificant in his eyes.
("An Old Man") — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 443242

This was the first living creature I had ever loved passionately, because he returned my affection. My love for the animal was, no doubt, exaggerated and ridiculous.I has a vague idea that in some way we were brothers, both lost in life, both lonely and defenseless. He never left me,slept at foot of my bed, was fed in the dining-room in spite of my parents' protests and he came with me on my solitary walks. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 260970

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

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 257820

Meetings constitute the charm of travelling. Who does not know the joy of coming, five hundred leagues from one's native land, upon a Parisian, a college friend, or a neighbour in the country? Who has not spent a night, unable to sleep, in the little jingling stage-coach of countries where steam is still unknown, beside a strange young woman, half seen by the gleam of the lantern when she clambered into the carriage at the door of a white house in a little town? — Guy De Maupassant

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

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 217990

Why is it a shame for me to cause
them to die and try to exterminate
them, tell me? You did not talk that
way when you used to come to my house
in Jeanne-d'Arc street. Ah! it is a
shame! You have not done as much,
with your cross of honor! I deserve
more merit than you, do you understand,
more than you, for I have killed more Prussians than you! — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 175586

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

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 140978

Her husband was not malicious, but he did bully, though without anger or animosity, as do petty tyrants who think that giving orders means swearing. In front of any stranger he behaved himself, but in his family he let himself go and pretended to be terrible although he was really scared of everybody. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 106599

War! When I but think of this word, I feel bewildered, as though they were speaking to me of sorcery, of the Inquisition, of a distant, finished, abominable, monstrous, unnatural thing. When they speak to us of cannibals, we smile proudly, as we proclaim our superiority to these savages. Who are the real savages? Those who struggle in order to eat those whom they vanquish, or those who struggle merely to kill? — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1168626

Military men are the scourges of the world. — Guy De Maupassant

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Her name was Marroca, probably her maiden name, and she pronounced it as though it had fifteen r's in it. — Guy De Maupassant

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There was an undoubted affinity in his mind between the two great passions of his life: revolution and good brew. The taste of one immediately brought to mind the other. — Guy De Maupassant

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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. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1329016

He was a fat little man with short arms, short legs, a short neck, short nose, short everything in fact. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1248443

The day exhausts me, irritates me. It is brutal, noisy. I struggle to get out of bed, I dress wearily and, against my inclination, I go out. I find each step, each movement, each gesture, each word, each thought as tiring as if I were lifting a crushing weight. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 95391

The air of Paris is quite different from any other. There's something about it which thrills and excites and intoxicates you, and in some strange way makes you want to dance and do all sorts of other silly things. As soon as I get out of the train, it's just as if I had drunk a bottle of champagne. What a time one could have surrounded by artists! How happy those lucky people must be, the great men who have made a name in a city like Paris! What a wonderful life they have! — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1211828

Suicide! But, if it is the strength of those who no longer have anything, it is the hope of all those who no longer believe, is the sublime value of the vanquished! Yeah, there's a door at least in this life, we can always open it and move on to the other side. The nature has had a movement of mercy; we have not been imprisoned. Thank you on behalf of the desperate! — Guy De Maupassant

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Death need not be sad, it should be a matter of indifference. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1191840

The fact was that despite himself, without knowing why or how it had happened and very much against his better judgement, he had fallen hopelessly in love. He had fallen as if into some deep and muddy hole. By nature he was a delicate and sensitive soul. He had had ideals and dreamed of an exquisite and passionate affair. And now he had fallen for this little cricket of a creature. She was as stupid as every other woman and not even pretty to make up for it. Skinny and foul-tempered, she had taken possession of him entirely from tip to toe, body and soul. He had fallen under the omnipotent and mysterious spell of the female. He was overwhelmed by this colossal force of unknown origin, the demon in the flesh capable of hurling the most rational man in the world at the feet of a worthless harlot. There was no way he could explain its fatal and total power. — Guy De Maupassant

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In fact living is dying. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1164189

March 20th. It is done. He was guillotined this morning. He made a good end, very good. It gave me infinite pleasure. How sweet it is to see a man's head cut off! The blood spurted out like a wave, like a wave. Oh, if I could, I would have liked to have bathed in it! What intoxicating ecstasy to crouch below it, to receive it in my hair and on my face, and rise up all crimson, all crimson! Ah, if people knew! — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1142687

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

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1093767

She stayed there, in her ball dress, without strength to go to bed, overwhelmed, on a chair, without a fire, without a thought. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1090579

I know nothing more enjoyable than that happy-go-lucky wandering life, in which you are perfectly free; without shackles of any kind, without care, without preoccupation, without thought even of to-morrow. You go in any direction you please, without any guide save your fancy. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1059180

The glasses were half full, which meant that the guests were completely so — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1058706

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

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 1045550

Yes, this is the only good thing in life: love! To hold a woman you love in your arms! That is the ultimate in human happiness. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 989477

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

Guy De Maupassant Quotes 977584

Nature loves death: she will not punish it. — Guy De Maupassant