Guy De Maupassant Quotes

Get black on white.

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!

It is the encounters with people that make life worth living.

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.

The only certainty is death.

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

In fact living is dying.

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

[My Uncle Sosthenes]

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.

Yes, this is the only good thing in life: love! To hold a woman you love in your arms! That is the ultimate in human happiness.

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?

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.

Entre pauvres gens, faut bien qu'on s'aide ... C'est les grands qui font la guerre.

Les vases du fleuve ensevelissaient ces vengeances obscures, sauvages et légitimes, héroïsmes inconnus, attaques muettes, plus périlleuses que les batailles au grand jour et sans le retentissement de la gloire.
Car la haine de l'Étranger arme toujours quelques Intrépides prêts à mourir pour une Idée.

What do you want?" he then asked her. And with clenched teeth, and trembling with anger, she replied: "I want-I want you to marry me, as you promised." But he only laughed and replied: "Oh! if a man were to marry all the girls with whom he has made a slip, he would have more than enough to do.

Any government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck."

[On Water]

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

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]