Quotes from Guy de Maupassant

We live always under the weight of the old and odious customs... of our barbarous ancestors.

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.

History, that excitable and unreliable old lady.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

I love the night passionately... 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.

We breathe love as we breathe air; we hold it in ourselves as we hold our thoughts. Nothing more exists for us.

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

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.

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.

Why does one love? How queer it is to see only one being in the world, to have only one thought in one's mind, only one desire in the heart, and only one name on the lips--a name which comes up continually, rising, like the water in a spring, from the depths of the soul to the lips, a name which one repeats over and over again, which one whispers ceaselessly, everywhere, like a prayer.

Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched. [ My Uncle Sosthenes ]

In the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Broad daylight does not encourage the apprehension of horror.