Quotes from Guy de Maupassant

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

History, that excitable and unreliable old lady.

Patriotism is a kind of religion it is the egg from which wars are hatched.

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

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

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

A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.

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

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

A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.

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.

breathing, sleeping, drinking, eating, working, dreaming, everything we do is dying. to live, in fact, is to die.

Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.

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

One sometimes weeps over one's illusions with as much bitterness as over a death.

A human being - what is a human being? Everything and nothing. Through the power of thought it can mirror everything it experiences. Through memory and knowledge it becomes a microcosm, carrying the world within itself. A mirror of things, a mirror of facts. Each human being becomes a little universe within the universe!

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.

The only certainty is death.

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.

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 better to be unhappy in love than unhappy in marriage, but some people manage to be both.

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.

She realized for the first time that two people can never reach each others deepest feelings and instincts, that they spend their lives side by side, linked it may be, but not mingled, and that each one's inmost being must go through life eternally alone.

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