A collection of quotes and sayings by Guy de Maupassant on books, eiffel-tower, friends, short-stories, style, necklace, life, smile, shadow, women, love and war.
Guy de Maupassant was a prolific 19th century French writer who is also considered as the ‘Father Of Short Story Writing’. His stories reveal the various aspects of French life during his times. A number of his stories also highlighted the Franco-Prussian War and revolved around the lives of innocent people who were party to it. His genre was naturalism and he expressed his thoughts, views and opinions through novels, short stories, poetry and travel books. Some of his notable works include, ‘A country Excursion’, ‘The Hairpin’, ‘The Gamekeeper’, ‘Une Vie’, ‘Des Vers’, ‘Old Judas’ and ‘The Necklace’ amongst various others. Read through the corpus of quotable quotes and sayings by Guy de Maupassant which have been excerpted from the vast sea of his work and life. Zoom through the quotes and thoughts by Guy de Maupassant which has a large readership to this date.
A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.
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
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
...A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.
One sometimes weeps over one's illusions with as much bitterness as over a death.
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.
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.
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.
Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched."
[My Uncle Sosthenes]
Guy de Maupassant
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.
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.
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.
Any government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck."
[On Water]
Guy de Maupassant
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.
Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governments."
[On Water]
Guy de Maupassant
I said, 'If other beings besides us exist on Earth, why didn't we meet them a long time ago?
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 great artists are those who impose their personal vision upon humanity.
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.
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
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
It is not difficult to pass for being learned. The secret is not to betray your ignorance.
Guy de Maupassant
Military men are the scourges of the world.
Guy de Maupassant
But he asked himself now if he would not be disobeying God. And does not God permit love, since He surrounds it with such visible splendor?
They had moved closer to one another to watch the dying moments of the day, this beautiful bright May day.
Guy de Maupassant
Put black on white.
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
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.
The dead dog had come more than a hundred miles to find its master.
[Mademoiselle Cocotte]
Guy de Maupassant
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.
Charming, charming,' the lawyer said at intervals.
Guy de Maupassant
Our senses are fairies who work the miracle of changing that movement into noise, and by that metamorphosis give birth to music, which makes the mute agitation of nature a harmony
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
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.
