Guy de Maupassant Quotes

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

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.

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

He was one of those many-faced politicians without any strong beliefs, with no great resources, no backbone and no real knowledge of anything, a country lawyer with provincial good looks, craftily walking the tight-rope between any extremist parties, a kind of republican Jesuit, a sort of dubious little mushroom such as flourish in their hundreds on the popular dunghill of universal suffrage.

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.

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 was simple, not being able to adorn herself, but she was unhappy, as one out of her class; for women belong to no caste, no race, their grace, their beauty and their charm serving them in place of birth and family. Their inborn finesse, their instinctive elegance, their suppleness of wit, are their only aristocracy, making some daughters of the people the equal of great ladies.

By nature independent, gay, even exuberant, seductively responsive and given to those spontaneous sallies that sparkle in the conversation of certain daughters of Paris who seem to have inhaled since childhood the pungent breath of the boulevards laden with the nightly laughter of audiences leaving theaters, Madame de Burne's five years of bondage had nonetheless endowed her with a singular timidity which mingled oddly with her youthful mettle, a great fear of saying too much, of going to far, along with a fierce yearning for emancipation and a firm resolve never again to compromise her freedom.

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 supernatural creatures.

<...> out of love of symmetry, just as people put two vases above a fireplace.

Get black on white.

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

"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."

[On Water]

Broad daylight does not encourage the apprehension of horror.

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