Top 120 Guy de Maupassant Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Death need not be sad, it should be a matter of indifference.”

— Guy de Maupassant

52. “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

53. “Do you know how I picture God myself?” he said. “As an enormous, creative organ beyond our ken, who scatters millions of worlds into space, just as one single fish would deposit its spawn in the sea. He creates because it is His function as God to do so, but He does not know what He is doing and is stupidly prolific in His work and is ignorant of the combinations of all kinds which are produced by His scattered germs.”

— Guy de Maupassant

54. “She danced with rapture, with passion, intoxicated by pleasure, forgetting all in the triumph of her beauty, in the glory of her success, in a sort of cloud of happiness comprised of all this homage, admiration, these awakened desires and of that sense of triumph which is so sweet to woman’s heart.”

— Guy de Maupassant

55. “A lawful kiss is never worth as much as a stolen one.”

— Guy de Maupassant

56. “Of all the passions, the only one that seems respectable to me is the passion for food.”

— Guy de Maupassant

57. “A sick thought can devour the body’s flesh more than fever or consumption.”

— Guy de Maupassant

58. “True love in my view can only flourish in conditions where there is a mixture of freedom and constraint. An imposed love, sanctioned by law and blessed by a priest does not really seem the same thing at all.”

— Guy de Maupassant

59. “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.”

— Guy de Maupassant

60. “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

61. “She removed the wraps, which covered her shoulders, before the glass, so as once more to see herself in all her glory. But suddenly she uttered a cry. She had no longer the necklace around her neck!”

— Guy de Maupassant

62. “Love always has its price, come whence it may.”

— Guy de Maupassant

63. “Broad daylight does not encourage the apprehension of horror.”

— Guy de Maupassant

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

— Guy de Maupassant

65. “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

66. “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

67. “Monsieur, beware of love! It is lying in ambush everywhere; it is watching for you at every corner; all its snares are laid, all its weapons are sharpened, all its guiles are prepared! Beware of love! Beware of love! It is more dangerous than brandy, bronchitis or pleurisy! It never forgives and makes everybody commit irreparable follies.”

— Guy de Maupassant

68. “One sometimes weeps over one’s illusions with as much bitterness as over a death.”

— Guy de Maupassant

69. “They were so absorbed in their plotting that they did not hear Boule de Suif return. But the Comte’s whispered ‘shh!’ made them all look up. There she was. A sudden silence fell, and at first a feeling of embarrassment prevented them from speaking to her. At last, however, the Comtesse, more of an adept than the rest in social duplicity, asked her: ‘Did you enjoy the christening?”

— Guy de Maupassant

70. “Es evidente que la soledad resulta peligrosa para las mentes que piensan demasiado.”

— Guy de Maupassant

71. “He was a fat little man with short arms, short legs, a short neck, short nose, short everything in fact.”

— Guy de Maupassant

72. “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

73. “Aquello que se ama con violencia acaba siempre por matarle a uno.”

— Guy de Maupassant

74. “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

75. “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.”

— Guy de Maupassant

76. “Solitude is obviously dangerous for people with active brains. We need men around us who have ideas and like talking. Leave us alone for any length of time, and we start filling the void with supernatural creatures.”

— Guy de Maupassant

77. “History, that excitable and unreliable old lady.”

— Guy de Maupassant

78. “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

79. “When the first fine spring days come, and the earth awakes and assumes its garment of verdure, when the perfumed warmth of the air blows on our faces and fills our lungs, and even appears to penetrate to our heart, we feel vague longings for undefined happiness, a wish to run, to walk at random, to inhale the spring.”

— Guy de Maupassant

80. “You’ll find that my coquetry is quite impartial, which allows me to keep my friends.”

— Guy de Maupassant

81. “But I no longer had a taste for anything, a wish for anything, a love for anybody, a desire for anything whatever, any ambition, or any hope.”

— Guy de Maupassant

82. “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

83. “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.”

— Guy de Maupassant

84. “I am lost! Someone has taken over my mind and is controlling it! Someone is in command of all my actions, movements, and thoughts. I am nothing inside, merely a spectator enslaved and terrified by everything I do.”

— Guy de Maupassant

85. “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?”

— Guy de Maupassant

86. “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

87. “Nevertheless man has found love, which is not a bad reply to that sly Deity, and he has adorned it with so much poetry that woman often forgets the sensual part of it. Those among us who are unable to deceive themselves have invented vice and refined debauchery, which is another way of laughing at God and paying homage, immodest homage, to beauty.”

— Guy de Maupassant

88. “Yes, but I say that Nature is our enemy, that we must always fight against Nature, for she is continually bringing us back to an animal state. You may be sure that God has not put anything on this earth that is clean, pretty, elegant or accessory to our ideal; the human brain has done it.”

— Guy de Maupassant

89. “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

90. “Military men are the scourges of the world.”

— Guy de Maupassant

91. “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

92. “Her name was Marroca, probably her maiden name, and she pronounced it as though it had fifteen r’s in it.”

— Guy de Maupassant

93. “Despite himself Paul was enchanted by the intoxicating loveliness of the night. It penetrated the terrible anguish he was feeling and stirred in his heart a fierce sense of irony. He longed with all his gentle and idealistic soul for a faithful woman to worship – someone in whose arms he could express all his love and tenderness as well as his passion.”

— Guy de Maupassant

94. “Then, one by one, they went away, for night was falling on the storm, wrapping in shadows the raging ocean and all the battling elements.”

— Guy de Maupassant

95. “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

96. “There is only one good thing in life, and that is love.”

— Guy de Maupassant

97. “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

98. “Ah! Those silly songs make us lose our heads; and, believe me, never marry a woman who sings in the country, especially if she sings the song of Musette!”

— Guy de Maupassant

99. “Horrible, this love to which he was now chained, a love without purpose and without aim, without joy and without triumph, a love that sickened, weakened, laid waste to everything, a love without sweetness and without intoxication, breeding nothing but regret and foreboding, tears and pain, hinting at the ecstasy of shared caresses only by some intolerable longing for kisses not to be wakened on cold lips, sterile and dry as dead leaves.”

— Guy de Maupassant

100. “And involuntarily I compared the childish sarcasm, the religious sarcasm of Voltaire with the irresistible irony of the German philosopher whose influence is henceforth ineffaceable.”

— Guy de Maupassant