Quotes from Guy de Maupassant

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

Everything I see reminds me that in a few days I shall no longer see it... It's horrible... I shall see nothing more... nothing of what exists... the smallest objects that we use... glasses... plates... beds where people sleep so comfortably... carriages. It's so lovely, going out in a carriage, in the evening... How much I enjoyed all that!

After all, life is never so jolly or so miserable as people seem to think.

Despite himself Paul was enchanted by the intoxicating loveliness of the night. It penetrated the terrible anguish he was feeling and stirred in his heart a fierce sense of irony. He longed with all his gentle and idealistic soul for a faithful woman to worship – someone in whose arms he could express all his love and tenderness as well as his passion.

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.

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

Elle se sentait noyée dans le mépris de ces gredins honnêtes qui l'avaient sacrifiée d'abord, rejetée ensuite, comme une chose malpropre et inutile.

When the first fine spring days come, and the earth awakes and assumes its garment of verdure, when the perfumed warmth of the air blows on our faces and fills our lungs, and even appears to penetrate to our heart, we feel vague longings for undefined happiness, a wish to run, to walk at random, to inhale the spring.

Did you ever sleep in a field of orange-trees in bloom? The air which one inhales deliciously is a quintessence of perfumes. This powerful and sweet smell, as savoury as a sweetmeat, seems to penetrate one, to impregnate, to intoxicate, to induce languor, to bring about a dreamy and somnolent torpor. It is like opium prepared by fairy hands and not by chemists.

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?

She stayed there, in her ball dress, without strength to go to bed, overwhelmed, on a chair, without a fire, without a thought.

But I no longer had a taste for anything, a wish for anything, a love for anybody, a desire for anything whatever, any ambition, or any hope.

How strange life is, how fickle! How little is needed for one to be ruined or saved!

It was one of those feminine faces whose every line has its own particular charm, and seems to possess a meaning, whose every movement seems to reveal or to conceal something.

He had a fund of small talk, a pleasant voice, a caressing glance and his moustache was irresistible. Crisp and curly, it curved charmingly over his lip, fair with auburn tints, slightly paler where it bristled at the ends.

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

Music, this complex and mysterious act, precise as algebra and vague as a dream, this art made out of mathematics and air, is simply the result of the strange properties of a little membrane. If that membrane did not exist, sound would not exist either, since in itself it is merely vibration. Would we be able to detect music without the ear? Of course not. Well, we are surrounded by things whose existence we never suspect, because we lack the organs that would reveal them to us. [ Was He Mad? ]

Dits par l'autre tout à l'heure ils l'irritaient et l'écoeuraient. Car les paroles d'amour, qui sont toujours les mêmes, prennent les goût des lèvres dont elles sortent.

Un rideau de flocons blancs ininterrompu miroitait sans cesse en descendant vers la terre; il effaçait les formes, poudrait les choses d'une mousse de glace; et l'on n'entendait plus, dans le grand silence de la ville calme et ensevelie sous l'hiver, que ce froissement vague, innommable et flottant de la neige qui tombe, plutôt sensation que bruit , entremêlement d'atomes légers qui semblaient emplir l'espace, couvrir le monde.

There is a part of everything which is unexplored, because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown.

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 everything I do.

Military men are the scourges of the world.

La vie, voyez-vous, ça n'est jamais si bon ni si mauvais qu'on croit.

On aime sa mère presque sans le savoir, et on ne prend conscience de toute la profondeur des racines de cet amour qu au moment de la séparation dernière.