Top 120 Guy de Maupassant Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

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

— Guy de Maupassant

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

— Guy de Maupassant

4. “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

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

— Guy de Maupassant

6. “How strange life is, how fickle! How little is needed for one to be ruined or saved!”

— Guy de Maupassant

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing.”

— Guy de Maupassant

11. “After all, life is never so jolly or so miserable as people seem to think.”

— Guy de Maupassant

12. “The only certainty is death.”

— Guy de Maupassant

13. “You must render: never report.”

— Guy de Maupassant

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

— Guy de Maupassant

15. “How strange and changeful is life! How small a thing is needed to make or ruin us!”

— Guy de Maupassant

16. “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.”

— Guy de Maupassant

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

— Guy de Maupassant

18. “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

19. “The bed comprehends our whole life, for we were born in it, we live in it, and we shall die in it.”

— Guy de Maupassant

20. “It was one of those bitter mornings when the whole of nature is shiny, brittle, and hard, like crystal. The trees, decked out in frost, seem to have sweated ice; the earth resounds beneath one’s feet; the tiniest sounds carry a long way in the dry air; the blue sky is bright as a mirror, and the sun moves through space in icy brilliance, casting on the frozen world rays which bestow no warmth upon anything.”

— Guy de Maupassant

21. “Every authentically loved being is a kind of god.”

— Guy de Maupassant

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

— Guy de Maupassant

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

— Guy de Maupassant

24. “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

25. “We love our mother unknowingly, and only realize how deep-rooted that love is at the ultimate separation.”

— Guy de Maupassant

26. “Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.”

— Guy de Maupassant

27. “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

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

— Guy de Maupassant

29. “It is better to be unhappy in love than unhappy in marriage, but some people manage to be both.”

— Guy de Maupassant

30. “How small a thing is needed to make or ruin us!”

— Guy de Maupassant

31. “Anguish of suspense made men even desire the arrival of enemies.”

— Guy de Maupassant

32. “Abstinence is the worst form of perversion.”

— Guy de Maupassant

33. “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

34. “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

35. “In fact living is dying.”

— Guy de Maupassant

36. “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.”

— Guy de Maupassant

37. “To lie about a far country is easy.”

— Guy de Maupassant

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

— Guy de Maupassant

39. “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

40. “Legitimized love always despises its easygoing brother.”

— Guy de Maupassant

41. “Suicide! But, if it is the strength of those who no longer have anything, it is the hope of all those who no longer believe, is the sublime value of the vanquished! Yeah, there’s a door at least in this life, we can always open it and move on to the other side. The nature has had a movement of mercy; we have not been imprisoned. Thank you on behalf of the desperate!”

— Guy de Maupassant

42. “I love the night passionately. I love it as I love my country, or my mistress, with an instinctive, deep, and unshakeable love. 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. Skylarks sing in the sunshine, the blue sky, the warm air, in the fresh morning light. The owl flies by night, a dark shadow passing through the darkness; he hoots his sinister, quivering hoot, as though he delights in the intoxicating black immensity of space.”

— Guy de Maupassant

43. “Did you ever sleep in a field of orange-trees in bloom? The air which one inhales deliciously is a quintessence of perfumes. This powerful and sweet smell, as savoury as a sweetmeat, seems to penetrate one, to impregnate, to intoxicate, to induce languor, to bring about a dreamy and somnolent torpor. It is like opium prepared by fairy hands and not by chemists.”

— Guy de Maupassant

44. “I have an immoderate passion for water; for the sea, though so vast, so restless, so beyond one’s comprehension; for rivers, beautiful, yet fugitive and elusive; but especially for marshes, teeming with all that mysterious life of the creatures that haunt them. A marsh is a whole world within a world, a different world, with a life of its own, with its own permanent denizens, its passing visitors, its voices, its sounds, its own strange mystery.”

— Guy de Maupassant

45. “Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship’s captain has to avoid a shipwreck.”

— Guy de Maupassant

46. “She hardly gave a thought to Julien; nothing in him surprised her any longer. But the double treachery of the Countess, her friend, disgusted her. Everyone in the world was a traitor, a liar, a deceiver, and tears came into her eyes. One sometimes weeps over one’s illusions with as much bitterness as over a death.”

— Guy de Maupassant

47. “First my husband, then my parents died. After that I lost my two sisters. When death comes to someone’s home it’s as if it wants to get as much done as quickly as possible to save coming again for a long time.”

— Guy de Maupassant

48. “I think I have already told you that there are certain things which it is not necessary to discuss, and this is one of them.”

— Guy de Maupassant

49. “Death need not be sad, it should be a matter of indifference.”

— Guy de Maupassant

50. “There are two races on earth. Those who need others, who are distracted, occupied and refreshed by others, who are worried, exhausted and unnerved by solitude as by the ascension of a terrible glacier or the crossing of a desert; and those, on the other hand, who are wearied, bored, embarrassed, utterly fatigued by others, while isolation calms them, and the detachment and imaginative activity of their minds bathes them in peace.”

— Guy de Maupassant