266 Quotes by Guy de Maupassant

Aquello que se ama con violencia acaba siempre por matarle a uno.

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.

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

I have an immoderate passion for water; for the sea, though so vast, so restless, so beyond one’s comprehension; for rivers, beautiful, yet fugitive and elusive; but especially for marshes, teeming with all that mysterious life of the creatures that haunt them. A marsh is a whole world within a world, a different world, with a life of its own, with its own permanent denizens, its passing visitors, its voices, its sounds, its own strange mystery.

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

Then, one by one, they went away, for night was falling on the storm, wrapping in shadows the raging ocean and all the battling elements.

Some people never have any luck. All at once, as though a thick veil had been whisked aside, he clearly saw the wretchedness – the bottomless, monotonous wretchedness – of his existence. The wretchedness which had been, which was, and which was yet to come. His last days indistinguishable from the first, with nothing ahead of him or behind him or around him, nothing in his heart, nothing anywhere.

The public is composed of numerous groups whose cry to us writers is: ‘Comfort me.’ ‘Amuse me.’ ‘Touch my sympathies.’ ‘Make me sad.’ ‘Make me dream.’ ‘Make me laugh.’ ‘Make me shiver.’ ‘Make me weep.’ ‘Make me think.’

At times it seemed to her that other people’s hearts must have arms like their bodies, loving arms extended to clasp and hold – and her own heart? All it had was eyes, that heart of hers.