Quotes by Guy de Maupassant

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When love comes, the soul is filled with heavenly happiness. And you know why? Do you know where this feeling of enormous happiness comes from? Because we imagine that the end of loneliness has come.

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Any man in state authority must avoid war just as the captain of a ship avoids an accident.

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Life is like a mountain: you climb it slowly, you go down it quickly.

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Fortunately, the search for joy is persistent, ineradicable, deeply rooted in our soul.

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He who does not respect himself is unhappy, but he who is too pleased with himself is a fool.

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We know that love is stronger than death, but more fragile than glass.

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There is no need for war, there is no need... Better to work, to think, to search. The only true glory is the glory of work. War is the destiny of barbarians.

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An ungrateful son is worse than a stranger: he is a criminal, because the son has no right to be indifferent to his mother.

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A writer can only do one thing: honestly observe the truth of life and portray it with skill; all the rest are feeble attempts by old hypocrites.

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All religions without exception are ridiculous: their morality is child-oriented, their promises are monstrously selfish and stupid.

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The words of love are always the same - it all depends on the one who says them.

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War is barbarism, when a peaceful neighbor is attacked, and a holy duty, when you defend your homeland.

"War is now more terrible than at any period in human history."

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Conviction fueled by imagination is often more painful than proven fact, because a person cannot be freed from it, nor can he recover from it.

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The thought of marriage makes every girl serious.

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A key that can be turned, a door that can be locked: you see, this is happiness.

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There are nights when even the sane dream as if they are growing wings.

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Happiness is selfish, it does not like strangers.

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Sometimes we mourn our dreams as sadly as the dead.

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We can always get to know people best through their writing. The word dazzles and deceives, because the face also plays with it, because the word comes from the mouth, and the mouth attracts, and the eye stuns. But the black letter on the white paper is the naked soul itself.

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How lonely all people are - how everything tears them apart, everything drives them far from what they love.

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There are moments when we see that everything around us has changed; even the movements take on a new significance, perhaps even certain hours of the day have changed their place.

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Every heart imagines: he was the first to tremble from the many experiences that have already made the hearts of the first people beat, and will make the last man and the last woman beat as well.

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There are no more honest people; at most, those who are honest compared to chicken catchers.

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With the rich, if one of them is frivolous, they are simply doing stupid things. They smile at him and say: he lives his world. Among the needy, however, the boy who forces his parents to disturb the scraps put aside is an evil creature, a wretch and a freak!

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The experience of life, which begins anew every day, the fresh, cheerful, loving life trembled among the leaves, pulsated in the air, reflected on the water.

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That's life! A few days, then nothing! Man is born, grows up, is happy, waits, and then dies. God be with you, man or woman, you will never return to earth! However, everyone carries within themselves the feverish, unrealizable desire for infinity, everyone is a separate everything in the universe, and everyone will be completely destroyed before long to fertilize the soil with new sprouts. Plants, animals, people, stars, whole worlds - they all come to life, then die to be transformed. And the same creature never returns, whether worm, man, or star!

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Never get involved in other people's business. Everyone has their own conscience. This should be a general rule.

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The silence of the rooms where one lives alone is so deep and so sad. This silence surrounds not only the body, but also the soul; when a piece of furniture creaks, one trembles to the core, because one was not prepared for any noise in the gloomy apartment.

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They preserve the casting pattern of the sculptures, the sticker, with which similar objects can always be created again, but my body, my face, my thoughts, my desires never appear again. Yet millions and thousands of millions of creatures are born, whose nose, eyes, forehead, face and mouth, in a few square centimeters, will have a nose, eyes, forehead, face and mouth like mine, and will have a soul like mine, but I, I will never return, no recognizable part of me will appear again in that innumerable, different creation, who are approximately the same and yet infinitely different from each other... What should man cling to? Who should you turn to with your desperate cries? What can we believe? All religions are stupid, with their childish morals and terribly stupid egoistic promises. Only death is certain.

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Every step brings us closer to death, every movement, every breath hastens its abominable work. Breathing, sleeping, eating, working, dreaming, everything we do - death. In short, to live is to die!

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There comes a day, and for many it comes early, when, as the saying goes, the fun is over, because no matter what you look at, you see death behind. (...) Yes, you understand all at once, you don't even know why or how, and then the color of everything in your whole life changes. For fifteen years, I have felt that it is chewing on me, as if I were carrying some kind of chewing worm inside me. I feel that it is slowly destroying, month by month, hour by hour, like a house on the verge of collapse. It's so completely distorted that I don't even recognize myself. I no longer have anything of the radiant, fresh and strong man I was in my thirties. I saw her dye my black hair white, with such expert, wicked slowness! He took my tight skin, my muscles, my teeth, my whole former body - he left nothing but a desperate soul, and soon he will take that too... Yes, the wretch crumbled, silently and hideously, slowly destroying my entire being second by second.

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You are cheerful at your age. He hopes for so many things that otherwise never happen. At my age, you don't expect anything anymore... just death.

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It doesn't matter if a person has a little more or less talent, because everything will end anyway.

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I delete the person in love from the list of the living. I consider it stupid, not only stupid, but also dangerous. With those who are in love with me, or claim to be in love, I break off all friendship; firstly, because they bore me, and secondly, because they are as suspicious to me as a rabid dog that might have a seizure at any moment. I will place them under moral moratorium until their illness is gone.

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There is no greater happiness than when two hands clasp each other for the first time; when one asks: do you love me? And the other answers: yes, I love you.

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How many there are who would give themselves up to a sudden desire, to an hour-long, quick and stormy whim, to a momentary flutter of love, if they did not fear that this short and superficial happiness would be paid for with irreparable scandal and painful tears.

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We women often invent what we don't know.

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Anything can penetrate a woman's mind with the help of emotion; it just usually doesn't stay in it for long.

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Today's men love today's women just enough so that love doesn't really hurt them.

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Only those happy are those who suffer their feelings, who tremble in the feeling and taste it like some delicacy. Because we have to understand all our emotions, whether happy or sad, we have to be filled with it, we have to be intoxicated by it to the loudest happiness or the most painful agony.

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A legal kiss is never worth a stolen kiss.

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What superhuman pleasure can overflow hearts when lips meet for the first time, when the embrace of four arms fuses two human beings crazy about each other into one being, one royally happy being.

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Let's love carnal love, but not calmly, in an ordinary way, according to order and law, but flamingly, wildly, unbridled! Let us search for it as they search for gold and diamonds, because it is more valuable than these, being priceless and transient! Let us pursue him ceaselessly, let us die for him and through him.

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The meeting of the mouths is the most perfect, most divine feeling given to man, the last, ultimate limit of happiness. During a kiss, only during a kiss, we sometimes feel that the impossible is realized, what we have been chasing, the two souls unite, the two hearts that lived together melt together.

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Do you know what our power really rests on? On the kiss, on the kiss alone. If we can reach out and let our lips through, we can even be queens. But the kiss is nothing more than a prelude. But it's a charming preface, much more interesting than the work itself.

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Talent comes from originality; and this is nothing but a special way of thinking, seeing, interpreting and judging.

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If there is originality in someone, first of all you have to develop it, if you don't have it, you have to get it somehow. The talent: a lot of patience.

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Kisses flash like lightning, love howls like a storm, and then life is calm again and goes on, just like before.

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We can never understand the other person, we can never know all the fluctuations of his will and desires. We can never guess the mystery of another's soul, no matter how close we feel.

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A person passes through our thought world, whom we meet, then who becomes our acquaintance, then our confidant, our lover. Hour by hour we take more possession of him, imperceptibly; we take possession of his features, his movements, his posture, his physical and mental state. He penetrates us, into our eyes and our hearts, with his voice, with all his articulations, with what he says and with what he thinks. We absorb and understand, we invent every nuance of his smile and words; in the end, it is as if everything is ours, we love so much, even unconsciously, everything that is him and everything that is from him.

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One never gets to know those whom one loves madly.

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Can you imagine more deplorable moments than when it gets dark in a strange place? We just go, go forward (...) as if we were dreaming. We look into faces we have never seen before and will never see again. (...) Our hearts are constricted, our feet are already stumbling, the soul is afraid. We just go like we're running away.

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Maybe love is also a legend, a legend of the soul, in which some people instinctively believe, while others ponder it until in the end they too just believe in it.

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What purpose could (...) God have? If the purpose of the night is sleep, unconsciousness, tranquility, great oblivion, why should the night be made more beautiful than the day, why is it sweeter than the dawn and the evening, and if the moon, this slow, enchanting, the a star more poetic than the sun is so tactful, as if its task was to visit what sensitively hides from the light - why does it shine through the darkness so brilliantly? And why does the singer with the most beautiful voice not rest like the others - why does he sing his song in the unsettling gloom? Why does this veil fall over the world? Why does the heart tremble, the soul is anxious, and why does the body languish? What is the use of all this kind of seduction, if it is not aimed at the person who does not even see it, since he is lying in his bed.

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God created woman only to tempt and test man. You should only approach it with protective caution, you should be afraid of it, like a trap.

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The man who loves normally in the sunlight loves madly in the moonlight.

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I know that love is a kind of appetite for you, but for me it would somehow be (...) a community of souls, which is very different from what men imagine.

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We think a lot about those we love from a distance, but we are used to not being able to see them all the time, and when we meet again, some kind of absence is mixed into our love, until only life together brings us together again.

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Now he realized for the first time that two people can never get to each other's soul, to the depths of their thoughts; that they walk side by side, sometimes intertwine, but do not become one; that everyone's moral being remains lonely throughout their lives.

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How quickly the age of dreams, the only happy age of life, flies away! He who has the divine ability to fall into his dreams as soon as he is left alone, is never lonely, never sad, never sullen or depressed.

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You see... life isn't as good... but it isn't as bad as we think it is either.

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There are secrets in our emotions that common sense cannot decipher.

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Life is a height. As long as you are climbing up, you look at the top and you are happy, but when you reach the top and look down, you suddenly see the slope. (...) The way up is long, but down is very short.

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After all, this is the only good thing in life: love! If a man can hold a beloved woman in his arms, this is the limit of human happiness.

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The words of love are always the same, the only thing that gives them their flavor is the lips from which they come.

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Life is gloomy in a house that seems empty, because someone we are so used to has disappeared forever, and if we get hold of some dear belongings of the dead person, our days are always filled with fresh pain. Each memory touches and wounds our hearts.

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His voice haunts me! We think we hear him. We want to escape, anywhere, anywhere, escape from the ghosts of this house. But you have to stay, because there are others who stay, and they also suffer.

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The time comes when you have to part! The old and the young don't usually stay together!

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No matter how cruel and hard fate is, is it possible not to hope when the sun is shining beautifully outside?

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Sympathetic or repulsive, splendid or poor, apartments can be as attractive, repulsive or repulsive as their inhabitants. They enliven or weaken the heart, enliven or dull the spirit, free speech in a person, or spoil the mood of the party, cheer up or depress, awaken some inexplicable desire in the guest to sit down or run away.

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Men do not believe in the virtue of single women - and perhaps they are right.

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- How can someone love artists if they don't like art? (...) - Well, artists are usually more entertaining than gavallers. - That's true, but their mistakes are also more intolerable.

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Emotion is our element, you men don't understand much about it, because it clouds your mind and enlightens ours.

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The aim of the novelist who wants to project an accurate picture of life before us (...) is not to tell a story to entertain or to affect us, but to force us to think, to understand the deep and hidden significance of events.

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All misery, sorrow, misfortune and death? Does everyone cheat, lie, bring suffering and tears? Where can we find some peace and joy? Probably in another existence. When the soul is freed from earthly trials. The soul!

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When we get old, there is nothing more horrible than looking back at our youth!

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No one ever comes back. Millions and billions will be born, they will be approximately similar to each other, they will have eyes, noses, mouths, skulls, and thoughts in them, but the one who lies in this bed will never appear again.

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It is not difficult to look like an educated person, the whole skill is not to be caught in ignorance. Man maneuvers, evades difficulties, circumvents obstacles, and uses a lexicon to outwit everyone. All men are as dumb as geese and as ignorant as donkeys.

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The sensible man fights for his place, the rest die. This is the social law.

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How charming things would be in life if we could mutually count on each other's perfect discretion! Women are often, very often, almost always stopped by the fear of revealing their secret.

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I see death so close now that I often want to reach out and push it back... I see it everywhere. A worm trampled on the road, a falling tree leaf, a white thread that I notice in the beard of one of my friends, tears my heart and shouts in my ear: it's here!

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For me, marriage is not a bond, but a social relationship. I want to be perfectly free in all my actions, steps, and movements. I couldn't stand control, jealousy, or someone criticizing my behavior. Of course I would oblige myself never to compromise the name of the man I married, never to make it hateful or ridiculous. The man should also commit to seeing her as an equal ally, not as a subordinate or a submissive and submissive spouse.

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You see, my little girl, this is the best thing in the world! The fire, the home fire, and our loved ones around it. This is more than anything!

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There are people we don't even think about anymore, and they suddenly appear in front of us! It's like you can see and hear them... and it's scary!

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Love doesn't last forever. People get together, they stand up. But when love lasts as long as it did between us, it becomes a terrible trap. I don't ask for more of it. It's the truth. But if you come to your senses, if you receive me and treat me as befits a friend, then from now on I will treat you as before.

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- Most of all, you need to be loved and show off (...). - This is true. I love that. But my heart also needs a secret companion. My vain pleasure in public worship does not prevent me from being devoted and faithful, nor from giving to one man what no one else has: the unshakable love of my heart, the sincere affection, the full and secret confidence of my soul, and in return to receive from him his loving love, and the very rare and very sweet feeling that I am not completely alone. This is not what you call love; but it's still worth something.

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One cannot be in love forever; at most loyal. Do you think that the body can be flailing in a frenzy for years? No no. As for those capricious, fierce women who experience longer, shorter, but wild passions, they simply believe that life is also a novel. Novel heroes are different, circumstances and complications are unpredictable and changeable, and the outcome is not the same. This amuses and amuses them, I confess, because the feelings of beginning love, fulfilled love, and passing love are different.

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A woman's real social position is always the one she can create the illusion of.

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Emotional triumphs know no sympathy.

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If someone loves us, even if it's just anyone, it means that we can be loved.

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He was terrified of suffering. He ran away from the pain, it hurt that he didn't love her the way he did, that there was such a cruel difference between their emotions, their not equally passionate kisses, he ran away from the pain of his heart bleeding from an incurable wound, which might never heal. He was afraid of even more cruel suffering, he was afraid that the anxiety of which he had only lived in anticipation for a few months, and which had really tormented him only for a few weeks, might last for years. He was as weak as ever, recoiling from pain as he had recoiled from great tests of strength all his life.

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I fell apart, I was attracted to inanimate things, to nature, which fascinates and moves me, to music, which for me is quintessential love, to thinking, which is the delicacy of the spirit, to everything that is pleasant and beautiful in the world. Then I met this creature, who took my somewhat hesitant, changeable desires together, turned them all towards himself, and turned them into love.

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You don't reject me, you accept me, you even offer me calm and sober happiness, which I should kneel down and thank you for as long as I live. But I'm not asking for it. Oh, what an agonizing and terrible love it is, which ceaselessly begs for a warm word, a heartfelt caress, and does not receive it! My heart is as empty as the stomach of a beggar who runs after himself for a long time with outstretched hands. You threw him nice things, but never bread. I needed bread, I needed love. I go away miserable and penniless, your love was not given to me, although a few crumbs of it could have saved me.

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To conquer them, you don't need a soul, a heart, an intellect, nor exceptional good qualities and merits, as in the past, when it was customary to fall in love with a man for his worth and courage. Today's women are comedians, comedians of love, they routinely play a traditional role over and over again, but they don't live it. They have sycophants who give the last words to them and lie about their roles as well as they do. Such gentlemen or non-gentlemen.

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If someone loves it, if someone shares the pleasure with it, the human animal is always grateful.

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Sometimes I feel like I want to grasp the intangible, sometimes I feel like I'm hugging ice, and by the time you let go of my arms, I freeze myself.

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Love is like intoxication. He who has drunk once will drink, he who has loved will always love.

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A child's love is just as mysterious as an adult's.

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Love is just like a disease: it can strike the same person more than once, and the blow can be fatal if love runs into insurmountable obstacles.

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Love is like lightning; it wreaks such havoc in the heart of whoever it strikes that no other emotion, not even a dream, can ever sprout there again.

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A panting jealousy (...) cannot compel us to commit crimes and follies while preserving the innocence of our hearts and minds.

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According to dreamy souls, the sea hides huge, blue landscapes in its womb, and those who dive into the water find themselves among huge fish, in strange forests, in crystal caves. The river, on the other hand, only has black depths where corpses rot in mud. Still, how beautiful it is when it shines in the rising sun and gently ripples between its shores lined with buzzing reeds!

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The land has limits for the fisherman; the river, on the other hand, in the dark, without moonlight: limitless. It is a different feeling than the sailor feels for the sea. It is true that the sea is often harsh and comical, but it shouts and roars, there is decency in it; the river, on the other hand, is quiet and treacherous. It doesn't murmur, it always flows incessantly, and to me this eternal movement of rushing water is more terrifying than the storied waves of the ocean.

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You townspeople don't know what a river is. But watch how a fisherman pronounces this word! For him, the river itself is the realm of mystery, depth, the unknown, illusions and nightmares, where at night you see things that are not there, and hear noises that you never hear.

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The great torment of our existence comes from the fact that we are eternally alone, and all our efforts, all our activities, are aimed at escaping from our loneliness.

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Why isn't life one big love? Why divorce? I loved you... And so do you. But you'll never love me like I do.

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Women have bodies to beautify, to decorate: not to be loved. They resemble a flower, they resemble a bird, they resemble a hundred other things, but not a woman. Their mothers, all the past generations, practiced the art of flirtation in order to be as beautiful as possible, but primarily they wanted to conquer with the direct charm of their bodies, with the natural power of their charm, with the irresistible attractiveness with which the female body affects the hearts of men. Nowadays, there is nothing but flirtatiousness: the art of beautification is the great tool and the goal itself, because it is mainly used to crush the noses of female rivals with it, to whip up their sterile jealousy, and not to conquer men.

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Alone! How cold it is! And how sad it all is! It's over! What a great thought! He doesn't hope, he doesn't wait, he doesn't dream about it anymore with that hot flame in his heart that sometimes makes it so good to live on this disconsolate earth, which is like when the fire of joy lights up in the dark evening. He says goodbye to the lonely, excited nights, when he paced up and down in his room until dawn, and he thought, when he woke up, when he barely opened his eyes, his first thought was "I'll see you again soon in our little house".

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It's consuming, yes, it's always consuming, even if it's happy, because even the most intimate moments can never satisfy the desire for the Woman that we carry inside us.

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Emotionally, he had always been too cautious in the world. The skin of his soul was too thin. That's why he lives so isolated, he's afraid of relationships and scratches. He does it wrong, because these bruises mostly result from the fact that we do not accept, cannot tolerate a nature that is very different from our own. He knew this, he had often observed it; but he could not change the peculiar radiance of his individuality either.

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At the time when the novelist and poet created fanciful, daydreaming women (...), the women themselves were looking for him and believed that they had found in life the copy of what their hearts had guessed in their readings. Nowadays, they try to avoid alluring, poetic appearances as carefully as possible, and show only the unadorned reality. Because, my friend, if there is more love in books, there is more love in life. In the past, ideals were created and women believed in their inventions. Today, only the austere is cited, and women, following their example, only believe in the everyday life of the earth.

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A woman exists for only two things, she came into the world for two things, only those two can unfold the flower of her true, great, wonderful qualities: one is love, the other is a child.

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Love is the fact that all the qualities of the person we love radiate an exceptional attractiveness to us, that we see them as different, different from everyone else, with the glory that the heart surrounds its chosen ones with, or it is also love, when you like someone very much, you like them so much, that we can hardly live without it?

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The faults of famous people are often greater than their virtues, that talent is as special a gift as a good eye and a good stomach, a gift that can only be utilized in the study room, a gift independent of everything else, nothing to do with that attractive combination of pleasant individual qualities that make warm human relationships create.

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How many times does it happen that excellent men fall head over heels in love with girls who are not worthy of them, stupid, vile, sometimes even ugly. Why? How? What is the secret of this? Then it is not a fateful meeting that plunges human beings into their moments of crisis, a person carries within himself a germ that suddenly conceives.

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Does a person love because he suddenly meets someone whom he feels was created for him by God, or because he was born to love? Sometimes he thinks that the heart itself has an arm, a tender, outstretched arm, with which it draws to itself, hugs and squeezes whomever it wishes; and his heart is crippled. It only has eyes.

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Everyone is unbearable (...), only those I like can be tolerated, and they are only because I like them.

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There are two kinds of men in love in the world: the one desires his love like a madman, but the day after his triumph his flag subsides, the other is shackled and enslaved by possession: physical love, mixed with that immaterial and inexpressible longing that the a man's heart sometimes radiates towards a woman, pushing her into the servitude of true and consuming love.

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What a man loves, what he is pleased with, what attracts him, he hastens towards; but what doesn't really tempt him, he always arrives at too soon, and there isn't an excuse he doesn't take to slow down, to stop, to delay that somehow unpleasant moment.

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Indeed, there is a woman in the world who is overwhelmed by passion, who suffers, who is beautiful when she gives herself, who hugs, squeezes and caresses, who loves with both her body and soul, with her mouth when she speaks, and with her eyes when she looks, with his beating heart and caressing hand, who accepts everything because he loves, who, even in the midst of watchful eyes and dangers, night and day, fearlessly and trembling, frantic with happiness and oblivious, finds the one who embraces him?

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A man in love can only be completely enslaved, can only be kept against rivals, if he gives himself to him, if he is kept on a chain connecting body to body.

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Once you have seen the shadow of love, once you have been touched by the agonizing and unrealizable hope that your life, soul, and body can merge with the life, soul, and body of another being, that you can dissolve in it and melt it into you, once you have felt this the possibility of a state of mind that cannot be expressed in words, will be fulfilled in itself, if not sooner, later.

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It forces the concept of love itself into the formula of "All or Nothing", and in my eyes this "all or nothing" means "first Everything, then Nothing". And nothing begins when she starts lying.

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Oh, how strange the way you think about love and the way you talk about it. For you, I am the one you often like to know right there by your side... on a chair. But you are the whole world to me; I don't know anything but you, I don't understand anything but you, I don't need anyone but you.

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You cry out to me: "Be like me; think, feel, talk like me." But I can't, dear. I am what I am. You must be accepted as God created you, because I gave myself to you in a way that I have not regretted, nor do I want to take myself back, because you are the dearest to me of all the human beings I know.

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The woman does not consciously process what she writes: feelings push the words into her brain, she does not look them up in dictionaries. If the feeling is very strong in him, he expresses it easily, unreservedly, and very accurately in the changeable honesty given by nature.

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A man well versed in the tricks of eloquence and the tricks of the trade, who is used to turning a pen in all matters of life, can often hide his true self in his impersonal - official or literary - writings. But the woman mostly writes to talk about herself and puts a little of herself into every word. He does not understand the intricacies of style, he exposes himself unsuspectingly with his unskilled expressions. He thought of the correspondence and memoirs of famous women he had read. How accurately they show themselves in their writings, the subtle, the witty, the emotional!

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You yourself gave him more and more of yourself, your thoughts, your innermost self, in confidential confessions, which are as sweet to give as to receive. He felt more connected with her, more honest, more open, more confidential than with others, and therefore he loved her even more. And he also felt - and this feeling is very valuable for women - that he really gives, that he entrusts everything he has to someone in a way that he has never done before.

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If a man loves us, and we are happy for him, because this kind of effort is only required if we feel that we are loved, and if that man is a high-order being, with some effort he can get us to feel anything, see through anything, understand anything, everything. , and slowly, little by little, every vibration of his spirit finds an echo in us. This then mostly fades, evaporates, dies out, because we forget, oh, we forget, just as the air forgets the spoken word. We are receptive and learnable, but our environment constantly bends, influences and changes us. If you only knew how many different states of mind change in me, and turn me into so many different beings according to the weather, how I feel, what I read, who I talk to. There are days when I have an exemplary family spirit, even though I don't have children, and other days, you might say, I have the soul of a whore, even though I don't have a lover.