Top 120 Guy de Maupassant Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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.”

— Guy de Maupassant

102. “But this pleasure was not unalloyed with pain, and it seemed as if the universal joy of the awakening world could now only impart a delight which was half sorrow to her grief-crushed soul and withered heart.”

— Guy de Maupassant

103. “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.”

— Guy de Maupassant

104. “This notary was a little man, completely round, round in every part. His head looked like a ball nailed onto another ball, supported by two legs that were so tiny and so short that they also closely resembled balls.”

— Guy de Maupassant

105. “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

106. “Next item – three ladies, all English, a mother and two daughters. Each wears a helping of whipped white of egg on the top of their head; rather remarkable. The daughters are old, like the mother. The mother is old, like the daughters. All three are thin, flat-chested, tall, stiff, and tired-looking; their front teeth are worn outside, to intimidate plates and men.”

— Guy de Maupassant

107. “Envy, bitter envy, was permeating his soul drop by drop, like a poison that tainted all his pleasures and made his life hateful.”

— Guy de Maupassant

108. “There was an undoubted affinity in his mind between the two great passions of his life: revolution and good brew. The taste of one immediately brought to mind the other.”

— Guy de Maupassant

109. “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.”

— Guy de Maupassant

110. “Ale, not beer, in a pewter mug was comme il faut, the only thing for a gentleman of letters, worthy of the name, to drink.”

— Guy de Maupassant

111. “What is the use of fine feelings when pitted against the power of instinct? And what chance does modest restraint have against that of natural desire?”

— Guy de Maupassant

112. “Some people are Freethinkers from sheer stupidity. My Uncle Sosthenes was one of these. Some people are often religious for the same reason.”

— Guy de Maupassant

113. “Some people never have any luck. All at once, as though a thick veil had been whisked aside, he clearly saw the wretchedness – the bottomless, monotonous wretchedness – of his existence. The wretchedness which had been, which was, and which was yet to come. His last days indistinguishable from the first, with nothing ahead of him or behind him or around him, nothing in his heart, nothing anywhere.”

— Guy de Maupassant

114. “The English have only three sauces – a white one, a brown one and a yellow one, and none of them have any flavor whatever.”

— Guy de Maupassant

115. “His life had gone by without adventures, without passions, almost without hopes. The facility of dreaming, planted in every man, had never blossomed in the narrow bed of his ambitions.”

— Guy de Maupassant

116. “Monsieur Lerebour was short, round and jovial, with the joviality of a shopkeeper who liked to do himself well. His wife, who was thin, self-willed and perpetually discontented, had still not succeeded in overcoming her husband’s good humour.”

— Guy de Maupassant

117. “Yet her heart did not thirst for emotions like the hearts of sentimental women; she was not searching for a man’s unique love nor for the gratification of a passion. All she required was the admiration of every man she met, acknowledgment of capitulation, the homage of universal tenderness.”

— Guy de Maupassant

118. “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?”

— Guy de Maupassant

119. “In the East men know panic, but they do not know what fright is.”

— Guy de Maupassant

120. “O sleep! ridiculous mystery which makes faces appear so grotesque, you are the revealer of human ugliness. You uncover all shortcomings, all deformities and all defects. You turn every face touched by you into a caricature.”

— Guy de Maupassant

121. “He did not know how to make her understand that he would be happy, most happy, to become her husband in his turn. He certainly could not tell her that, now, at this moment, in this place, in the presence of this corpse; nevertheless he could, he believed, find one of those ambiguous, acceptable, complicated statements whose words have hidden significance, and which can, by their calculated reservations, express everything you intend.”

— Guy de Maupassant

122. “Then, as the priest was emerging somewhat uneasily from his lair, he went straight up to him, looked deep into his eyes, and growled into his face: ‘If you weren’t wearing skirts, what a punch I’d give you right on your ugly snout, wouldn’t I just!”

— Guy de Maupassant

123. “The glasses were half full, which meant that the guests were completely so.”

— Guy de Maupassant

124. “Several sailors, sheltered behind the curved bottoms of their boats, were watching this battle of the sky and the sea.”

— Guy de Maupassant

125. “There can be no doubt that loneliness is dangerous to active minds.”

— Guy de Maupassant

126. “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.”

— Guy de Maupassant

127. “He himself was one of your noisy roisterers, for whom life holds no greater pleasures than wine and bought women. Outside these two poles of existence, he understood nothing. Braggart, brawler, contemptuous of every living person, he despised the whole world from the heights of his ignorance.”

— Guy de Maupassant

128. “Institutionalised love always looks down on her more liberal sister.”

— Guy de Maupassant

129. “Is it not rather the touch of Love, of Love the Mysterious, who seeks constantly to unite two beings, who tries his strength the instant he has put a man and a woman face to face?”

— Guy de Maupassant

130. “I drink to the victory of the mind over the millions.”

— Guy de Maupassant

131. “Daylight does not lend itself to terror: objects and people are plain to see; and we encounter there only those things which dare to show themselves in the glare of day. But night, opaque night denser than walls, night, empty and infinite and so black and fathomless that terrifying things reach out and touch us, night when we feel horror stirring, mysteriously prowling – night seemed to him to hide some unknown, imminent, threatening danger. What could it be?”

— Guy de Maupassant

132. “But it is sufficient to reflect for a moment, in order to understand that this world was not made for such creatures as we are. Thought, which is developed by a miracle in the nerves of the cells in our brain, powerless, ignorant and confused as it is, and as it will always remain, makes all of us who are intellectual beings eternal and wretched exiles on earth.”

— Guy de Maupassant

133. “Philippe-Auguste was an ugly child, with uncombed hair and dirt all over him, and the face of a cretin.”

— Guy de Maupassant

134. “They had moved closer to one another to watch the dying moments of the day, this beautiful bright May day.”

— Guy de Maupassant

135. “I reason everything out, and usually analyze my tastes too well to succumb to them blindly. And that’s my chief defect, the real cause of my weakness. But this woman has taken possession of me in spite of myself, in spite of my fear and my knowledge of her; and she possesses me as if she had plucked out, one after the other, my every last aspiration.”

— Guy de Maupassant

136. “He was one of those many-faced politicians without any strong beliefs, with no great resources, no backbone and no real knowledge of anything, a country lawyer with provincial good looks, craftily walking the tight-rope between any extremist parties, a kind of republican Jesuit, a sort of dubious little mushroom such as flourish in their hundreds on the popular dunghill of universal suffrage.”

— Guy de Maupassant

137. “I should add that there are undoubtedly charming Englishmen; I have often met them. But they are rarely our fellow-guests at hotels.”

— Guy de Maupassant

138. “Describing Ostend oysters: “small and rich, looking like little ears enfolded in shells, and melting between the palate and the tongue like salted sweets.”

— Guy de Maupassant