266 Quotes by Guy de Maupassant

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.

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

I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing

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.

I drink to the victory of the mind over the millions.

His generosity was his great strength and his great weakness; he had not enough hands to caress, to embrace, to give; it was the generosity of a creative power, without method and without toughness, which as it were sapped the muscles of his will and almost amounted to a vice.

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.

Every ideal comes from us as do all the amenities of life, in order to make our existence as simple reproducers, for which divine Providence solely intended us, less monotonous and less hard.

There was an undoubted affinity in his mind between the two great passions of his life: revolution and good brew. The taste of one immediately brought to mind the other.