Guy de Maupassant Quotes

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

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

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.

To love very much is to love inadequately; we love-that is all. Love cannot be modified without being nullified. Love is a short word but it contains everything. 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 the air, we hold it in ourselves as we hold our thoughts. Nothing more exists for us. Love is not a word; it is a wordless state indicated by four letters.

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

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

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

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

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!

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Abstinence is the worst form of perversion.

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

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.

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.

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

You must render: never report.

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

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

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

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