Quotes from Guy de Maupassant

In fact living is dying.

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.

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

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.

Les paroles d'amour, qui sont toujours les mêmes, prennent le goût des lèvres dont elles sortent.

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.

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

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

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

Love means the body, the soul, the life, the entire being. We feel love as we feel the warmth of our blood, we breathe love as we breathe air, we hold it in ourselves as we hold our thoughts. Nothing more exists for us.

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