Quotes by Guy de Maupassant

“There were office-worn gents with yellow faces, bent backs, and one shoulder set slightly higher than the other from spending hours hunched over desks. And their sad, anxious faces spoke volumes ab...”

“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.”

“I had kissed her at odd times, in out of the way corners, in the manner of a mountain guide, nothing more.”

“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 shipw”

“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 governm”

“Madeleine in her turn stared at him steadily, straight into his eyes, in a profound, strange way, as if seeking to read something there, as if seeking to discover there that hidden part of a human ...”

“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...”

“She was no longer the fair-haired, colourless girl whom I had seen at the church fifteen years before, but a stout, over-dressed lady, one of those ladies with no age, no character, no elegance, no...”

“We are all very much alike in France in this respect; we still remain knights, knights of love and fortune, since God has been abolished whose bodyguard we really were. But nobody can ever get woma...”

“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.”

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

“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 pro...”

“I said, 'If other beings besides us exist on Earth, why didn't we meet them a long time ago?”

“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 super...”

“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 den...”

“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 ...”

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

“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.”

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