Guy De Quotes & Sayings

Mother made sure her little kids were subjected to a strict routine. We were given a timetable which covered our every waking moment, copies of which were posted by our bedside, in the sitting room and in the kitchen. Story hour meant that mother would read us novels and short stories by Guy de Maupassant, Oscar Wilde and Edmondo de Amicis. Soon we graduated to Tolstoy, Gogol and Turgenev. She read them to us in Chinese and I never realised until much later that the writers wrote them in different European languages. Comics were absolutely forbidden and so were Enid Blyton adventures and pop music ... Lee Cyn and I soon went to a primary school nearby ... After mother's rigorous timetable, school became fun and easy-going. — Ang Swee Chai

Love means the body, the soul, the life, the entire being. We feel love as we feel the warmth of our blood, we breathe love as we breathe air, we hold it in ourselves as we hold our thoughts. Nothing more exists for us. — Guy De Maupassant

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

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

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

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

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

Do you know how I picture God myself?" he said. "As an enormous, creative organ beyond our ken, who scatters millions of worlds into space, just as one single fish would deposit its spawn in the sea. He creates because it is His function as God to do so, but He does not know what He is doing and is stupidly prolific in His work and is ignorant of the combinations of all kinds which are produced by His scattered germs. — Guy De Maupassant

Were a man to spend only one day in Sicily and ask, "What must one see?" I would answer him without hesitation, "Taormina." It is only a landscape, but a landscape where you find everything on earth that seems made to seduce the eyes, the mind and the imagination. — Guy De Maupassant

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

The woman, one of those usually known as a good-time girl, was famous for the premature portliness which had earned her the nickname Boule de Suif. Small, round as a barrel, fat as butter and with fingers tightly jointed like strings of small sausages, her glowing skin and the enormous bosom which strained under the constraints of her dress - as well as her freshness, which was a delight to the eye - made her hugely desirable and much sought after. She had a rosy apple of a face, a peony bud about to burst into bloom. Out of it looked two magnificent dark eyes shaded by thick black lashes. Further down was a charming little mouth complete with invitingly moist lips and tiny, gleaming pearly-white teeth. She was said to possess a variety of other inestimable qualities. — Guy De Maupassant

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

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

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

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

The Greeks, at least by the fourth century BC, knew Britain as Albion. Originally applied to a Spanish tribe called the 'Albiones', the term was later adopted for Britain, perhaps because of its similarity to the Greek word for whiteness, alphos, thanks to the white chalk cliffs of the southeast coast. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century AD, says that Britain had 'previously' been called Albion, so by then the name must have fallen out of common use.2 By the time Britain began to be referred to more frequently, the Greeks called it Prettannia, or Brettannia.3 What does seem certain is that in the fourth century BC, Pytheas of Massilia (Marseilles) sailed to Britain. Pytheas wrote down his experiences, but these only survive as incidental third-hand references by later writers. Most — Guy De La Bedoyere

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

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

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

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

< ... > out of love of symmetry, just as people put two vases above a fireplace. — Guy De Maupassant

Sometimes our thoughts turn back toward a corner in a forest, or the end of a bank, or an orchard powdered with flowers, seen but a single time on some happy day, yet remaining in our hearts and leaving in soul and body an unappeased desire which is not to be forgotten, a feeling that we have just rubbed elbows with happiness. — Guy De Maupassant

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

I liked Vittorio De Sica a lot, and I got to work with him once in a segment movie. He was a great director. He was a very charismatic character and a guy I watched a lot when he was directing. — Clint Eastwood

Vote? What's so fun about voting? You should never vote, everyone knows that. If you vote and your guy wins you can't later complain because you helped put him there. That's why I never vote, so I can later complain. — Sergio De La Pava

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

Mr Rutger cornet de Groot. Never read any American poetry or any other foreign poetry, which is why he always mentions 2 poets as a reffering point, either Lucebert or Tonnus Oosterhoff. The guy started reading when he was 48 years old with a few library books and was turned instantly in one of the most important critics hired by the fund of literature. Oh well. — Martijn Benders

She was pretty and, even more, she was smart, and she had a divine figure according to all accounts. He fell in love with her, as a man always falls in love with any attractive woman whom he sees a lot of. — Guy De Maupassant

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

It is the encounters with people that make life worth living. — Guy De Maupassant

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

Language dazzles and deceives because it is masked by faces, because we see it emerging from the lips, because lips please and eyes beguile. But words on paper, black on white, reveal the naked soul. — Guy De Maupassant

Legitimized love always despises its easygoing brother. — Guy De Maupassant

On the whole, my family had always adopted a reserved attitude toward Zionism; my great-uncle Edmond had acted on his own in generously supporting Jewish Palestine, for reasons more humanitarian and religious than political. But the devastation caused by the war and the extermination of six million Jews radically changed all of our former attitudes. The idea of a Jewish homeland acquired an intense emotional appeal; I myself became an ardent Zionist.. — Guy De Rothschild

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

Why not other elements besides fire, air, earth and water? There are four of them, just four, those foster parents of beings! What a pity! Why aren't there forty elements instead, or four hundred, or four thousand? How paltry everything is, how miserly, how wretched! Stingily given, aridly invented, heavily made!
Why not other elements besides fire, air, earth and water? There are four of them, just four, those foster parents of beings! What a pity! Why aren't there forty elements instead, or four hundred, or four thousand? How paltry everything is, how miserly, how wretched! Stingily given, aridly invented, heavily made! — Guy De Maupassant

History, that excitable and unreliable old lady. — Guy De Maupassant

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

You have to kill the bad guy. — Dino De Laurentiis

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

They had moved closer to one another to watch the dying moments of the day, this beautiful bright May day. — Guy De Maupassant

When a man does not live with his children and does not get along with the mother of his children, his fatherhood becomes essentially untenable, regardless of how he feels, how hard he tries, or whether he is a good guy. Almost by definition, he has become de-fathered. — David Blankenhorn

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

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

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

It was one of those feminine faces whose every line has its own particular charm, and seems to possess a meaning, whose every movement seems to reveal or to conceal something. — Guy De Maupassant

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

Even at the time - twenty years old - I said to myself: better to go hungry, to go to prison, to be a tramp, than to sit at an office desk ten hours a day. There is no particular daring in this vow, but I have not broken it and shall not do so. The wisdom of my grandfathers sat in my head: we are born for the pleasure of work, fighting, love, we are born for that and nothing else. (Guy de Maupassant) — Isaac Babel

There is only one good thing in life, and that is love. — Guy De Maupassant

If I found the right guy, I think I would get married. Maybe. I just feel like it's just a contract. Why sign any more contracts, really? — Drea De Matteo

I had to go on TV with the president of the Catholic League, which is not an official organization at all, just a lot of Catholics, or maybe it's just this guy. He demanded to de-fund art completely and argued that taxpayers should not pay for it. I said people who represent the Catholic Church shouldn't talk about taxes. — Fran Lebowitz

This guy! I plead the fifth. This guy is nuts."
- Eminem
"Dope questions, man. Very insightful, very thoughtful."
- Guru (Gang Starr)
"You like a Psychiatrist or some shit? This shit is just coming out but go ahead."
- Mary J. Blige
"Definitely a real interview! Digging deep up in there, man. Not afraid to ask questions!"
- K-Ci Hailey (Jodeci)
"The Wizard asked me for a copy of your magazine."
- Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo (Daft Punk)
"You didn't wear your glasses and you haven't carried your hearing aid. What else is wrong with you?"
- Bushwick Bill
"Peace and blessing, Brother Harris. Thank you for inspiring my words. Keep 'yo balance."
- Erykah Badu
"Can I see that pen?"
- Bobby Brown
"What else do you want to know? Talk to me."
- Aaliyah — Harris Rosen

A lawful kiss is never worth as much as a stolen one. — Guy De Maupassant

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

A terrible event had broken him down. He had fallen madly in love with a young girl and married her in a kind of dreamlike ecstasy. After a year of unalloyed bliss and unexhausted passion, she had died suddenly of heart disease, no doubt killed by love itself. — Guy De Maupassant

Everything I see reminds me that in a few days I shall no longer see it ... It's horrible ... I shall see nothing more ... nothing of what exists ... the smallest objects that we use ... glasses ... plates ... beds where people sleep so comfortably ... carriages. It's so lovely, going out in a carriage, in the evening ... How much I enjoyed all that! — Guy De Maupassant

My dogs forgive anger in me, the arrogance in me, the brute in me. They forgive everything I do before I forgive myself. — Guy De La Valdene

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

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

When we are young, our mornings are triumphant!" Then — Guy De Maupassant

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

I can't understand people who don't like chocolate. I was once going out with a
guy, this guy Robert I was telling you about, and I was never really
comfortable with him, but I couldn't work out why. Then one day it all became
clear: he didn't like chocolate. I mean he didn't just not love it, this guy
actually hated it. You could have put a bar in front of him and he wouldn't
have touched it. That kind of thinking is so far removed from anything I can
relate to, you know. Well, after that, you can imagine, it was clear we had to
break up. — Alain De Botton

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

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

Of all the sounds that touch my soul these days, the most beautiful one of all is silence. — Guy De La Valdene

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

Of course, I didn't know how I felt about my first kiss coming from one of the undead, but hey, beggars can't be choosers, and let me tell you something, Jesse was way cuter than any live guy I'd met lately. — Meg Cabot

Look at this guy, he's mostly taint. I have no idea why he's so difficult to beat. — Andy De Fonseca

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

The woman, who belonged to the courtesan class, was celebrated for an embonpoint unusual for her age, which had earned for her the sobriquet of "Boule de Suif" (Tallow Ball). Short and round, fat as a pig, with puffy fingers constricted at the joints, looking like rows of short sausages; with a shiny, tightly-stretched skin and an enormous bust filling out the bodice of her dress, she was yet attractive and much sought after, owing to her fresh and pleasing appearance. Her face was like a crimson apple, a peony-bud just bursting into bloom; she had two magnificent dark eyes, fringed with thick, heavy lashes, which cast a shadow into their depths; her mouth was small, ripe, kissable, and was furnished with the tiniest of white teeth. — Guy De Maupassant

Guy de Chauliac's advice to those wishing to avoid infection is as follows: 'Go quickly, go far, and return slowly. — Ian Mortimer

Appeal. Guy's like you get all excited about the appeal. Don't you see that I view the very existence of an appeal as a disastrous failure? No much worse, a personal affront of the highest order for which I blame you. — Sergio De La Pava

What you love too violently finishes by killing you. — Guy De Maupassant

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

Being perceived as a guy is nothing new or complicated to me. It is what it is. — Saskia De Brauw

When the first fine spring days come, and the earth awakes and assumes its garment of verdure, when the perfumed warmth of the air blows on our faces and fills our lungs, and even appears to penetrate to our heart, we feel vague longings for undefined happiness, a wish to run, to walk at random, to inhale the spring. — Guy De Maupassant

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

The Bronx are great. I have a lot of respect for those guys, they know more about music and how that world works than most of the players out there. — Coeur De Pirate

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

The dead dog had come more than a hundred miles to find its master.
[Mademoiselle Cocotte] — Guy De Maupassant

O sleep! ridiculous mystery which makes faces appear so grotesque, you are the revealer of human ugliness. You uncover all shortcomings, all deformities and all defects. You turn every face touched by you into a caricature. — Guy De Maupassant

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

I should add that there are undoubtedly charming Englishmen; I have often met them. But they are rarely our fellow-guests at hotels. — Guy De Maupassant

It is good to be busy. Being busy takes our mind off being in love at the wrong time, in the wrong place and with the wrong guy. — Melissa De La Cruz

So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when I was applying for campus housing and overheard Andy telling my mother that the only way I was going to be safe from all the sexual assaults he'd heard about on National Public Radio was if I lived in an all-girl dorm.
Never mind that I have been kicking the butts of the undead since I was in elementary school, and that almost the entire time I resided under Andy's roof, I had a hot undead guy living in my bedroom. These are two of those secrets I was telling you about. Andy doesn't know about them, and neither does my mother. They think Jesse is what Father Dominic told them he is: a "young Jesuit student who transferred to the Carmel Mission from Mexico, then lost his yearning to go into the priesthood" after meeting me.
That one slays me every time. — Meg Cabot

I don't go after him. He's a funny sort of boy. I've known that from the start. Not just because he seems angry and contemptuous or the way he walks like a tough guy. Because of his smile - it's a child's smile. — Delphine De Vigan

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

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

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

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

So the HP guy comes up to me (at the Melbourne conference) and he says, 'If you say nasty things like that to vendors you're not going to get anything'. I said 'no, in eight years of saying nothing, we've got nothing, and I'm going to start saying nasty things, in the hope that some of these vendors will start giving me money so I'll shut up'. — Theo De Raadt

Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.
[My Uncle Sosthenes] — Guy De Maupassant

There is a part of everything which is unexplored,
because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown. — Guy De Maupassant

Abstinence is the worst form of perversion. — Guy De Maupassant

It was only when God paired him up with his extroverted brother Aaron that Moses agreed to take on the assignment. Moses would be the speechwriter, the behind-the-scenes guy, the Cyrano de Bergerac; Aaron would be the public face of the operation. "It will be as if he were your mouth," said God, "and as if you were God to him. — Susan Cain

Gaddafi's a great bloke. The media only show the bad things. I used to go round his house. His son's a super simple guy. All the Gaddafis were very down to earth. — Luis De Agustini

Several sailors, sheltered behind the curved bottoms of their boats, were watching this battle of the sky and the sea. — Guy De Maupassant

We are, on earth, two distinct races. Those who have need of others, whom others amuse, engage soothe, whom solitude harasses, pains, stupefies, like the movement of a terrible glacier or the traversing of the desert; and those, on the contrary, whom others weary, tire, bore, silently torture, whom isolation calms and bathes in the repose of independency, and plunges into the humors of their own thoughts. In fine, there is here a normal, physical phenomenon. Some are constituted to live a life outside of themselves, others, to live a life within themselves. As for me, my exterior associations are abruptly and painfully short-lived, and, as they reach their limits, I experience in my whole body and in my whole intelligence an intolerable uneasiness. — Guy De Maupassant

Institutionalised love always looks down on her more liberal sister — Guy De Maupassant

In a policy shift which the historian Guy de la Bedoyere has compared with Western Imperialism, the Romans converted militant Britons to their way of life with consumer entincements, introducing them to the urbane pleasures of hot spas and fine dining, encouraging them to wear togas and speak Latin. — Catharine Arnold