266 Quotes by Guy de Maupassant

Death need not be sad, it should be a matter of indifference.

How strange and changeful is life! How small a thing is needed to make or ruin us!

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.

Suicide! But, if it is the strength of those who no longer have anything, it is the hope of all those who no longer believe, is the sublime value of the vanquished! Yeah, there’s a door at least in this life, we can always open it and move on to the other side. The nature has had a movement of mercy; we have not been imprisoned. Thank you on behalf of the desperate!

Certainly solitude is dangerous for active minds. We require around us men who can think and talk. When we are alone for a long time, we people space with phantoms.

Several sailors, sheltered behind the curved bottoms of their boats, were watching this battle of the sky and the sea.

Her name was Marroca, probably her maiden name, and she pronounced it as though it had fifteen r’s in it.

I told myself: ‘I am surrounded by unknown things.’ I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me – afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptiness?

Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship’s captain has to avoid a shipwreck.