74+ Guy de Maupassant Quotes (Short, Realistic And Vivid)

Guy de Maupassant was a French writer who is widely regarded as one of the fathers of the modern short story. He was a protégé of Gustave Flaubert, and is known for his stories of psychological insight, social irony, and naturalism. He is also remembered for his famous novel, Bel-Ami, which was published in 1885.

Top 10 Guy De Maupassant Quotes

1. Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.
2. Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.
3. A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.
4. Of all the passions, the only one that seems respectable to me is the passion for food
5. 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.
6. Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.
7. Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. Abstinence is the worst form of perversion.

Guy De Maupassant Short Quotes

• The great artists are those who impose their personal vision upon humanity.
• There is only one good thing in life, and that is love.
• I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt.
• History, that excitable and unreliable old lady.
• The bed comprehends our whole life, for we were born in it, we live in it, and we shall die in it
• Champagne... the wine of kings, the king of wines
• The essence of life is the smile of round female bottoms, under the shadow of cosmic boredom.
• Military men are the scourges of the world.
• In the East men know panic, but they do not know what fright is.
• Love always has its price, come whence it may.

Guy de Maupassant Famous Quotes And Sayings

She was a sweet girl but not really pretty, a rough sketch of a woman with a little of everything in her, one of those silhouettes which artists draw in three strokes on the tablecloth in a café after dinner, between a glass of brandy and a cigarette. Nature sometimes turns out creatures like that. — Guy de Maupassant

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

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

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

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

She was the temptress who had ensnared the first man, and who still continued her work at damnation; she was the being who is feeble, dangerous, mysteriously troubling. And even more than her body of perdition, he hated her loving soul. — Guy de Maupassant

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

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

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

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

How weak our mind is; how quickly it is terrified and unbalanced as soon as we are confronted with a small, incomprehensible fact. Instead of dismissing the problem with: "We do not understand because we cannot find the cause," we immediately imagine terrible mysteries and supernatural powers. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And taking her friend’s hand, she put it on her breast, on that firm round covering of a woman’s heart which the male often finds so satisfying that he makes no attempt to find what lies beneath it. — Guy de Maupassant

You must render: never report. — Guy de Maupassant

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

To contest an author's right to create a poetic or realistic work is to want to force him to change his temperament, challenge his originality, refuse to allow him to use the eye and the intelligence nature has given him. — Guy de Maupassant

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

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

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

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

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

The only certainty is death. — Guy de Maupassant

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

I have seen mad people, and I have known some who were quite intelligent, lucid, even clear-sighted in every concern of life, except on one point. They could speak clearly, readily, profoundly on everything; till their thoughts were caught in the breakers of their delusions and went to pieces there, were dispersed and swamped in that furious and terrible sea of fogs and squalls which is called MADNESS. — Guy de Maupassant

To lie about a far country is easy — Guy de Maupassant

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

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

There are in France some fifty thousand young men of good birth and fairly well off who are encouraged to live a life of complete idleness. They must either cease to exist or must come to see that there can be no happiness, no health even, without regular daily labor of some sort... The need of work is in me. — Guy de Maupassant

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

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. — Guy de Maupassant

In fact living is dying. — Guy de Maupassant

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

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. — Guy de Maupassant

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

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

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 — Guy de Maupassant

Whatever one wishes to say, there is one noun only by which to express it, one verb only to give it life, one adjective only which will describe it. One must search until one has discovered them, this noun, this verb, this adjective, and never rest content with approximations, never resort to trickery, however happy, or to vulgarism, in order to dodge the difficulty. — Guy de Maupassant

Life Lessons by Guy de Maupassant

1. Guy de Maupassant's work emphasizes the importance of paying attention to the small details of everyday life. He often explores the complexities of human relationships and the power of the natural world.
2. His stories often feature characters who are struggling with the mundane realities of life, such as poverty, loneliness, and the inevitability of death.
3. Through his work, Maupassant teaches us to appreciate the beauty in the everyday and to recognize the power of the human spirit to overcome adversity.