Quotes by 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”

“Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ships captain has to avoid a shipwreck.”

“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.”

“Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! Its the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all. How do we define this lively darting about with words, of hitting them back and forth, this sort of brief smile of ideas which should be conversation?”

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

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

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

Life is a slope. As long as youre going up youre 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. Its slow going up and quick going down.

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!

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.

The only certainty is death.

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

In fact living is dying.

Get black on white.

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

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.

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

I told myself: I am surrounded by unknown things. I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me – afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptiness?

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 Burnes 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.

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?