Quotes by Guy de Maupassant

“It is the lives we encounter that make life worth living.””

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

“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?””

“The kiss itself is immortal. It travels from lip to lip, century to century, from age to age. Men and women garner these kisses, offer them to others and then die in turn.””

“breathing, sleeping, drinking, eating, working, dreaming, everything we do is dying. to live, in fact, is to die.””

“Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.””

“One sometimes weeps over one's illusions with as much bitterness as over a death.””

“The past attracts me, the present frightens me, because the future is death.””

“A human being - what is a human being? Everything and nothing. Through the power of thought it can mirror everything it experiences. Through memory and knowledge it becomes a microcosm, carrying the world within itself. A mirror of things, a mirror of facts. Each human being becomes a little universe within the universe!””

“Life is a slope. As long as you're going up you're always looking towards the top and you feel happy, but when you reach it, suddenly you can see the road going downhill and death at the end of it all. It's slow going up and quick going down.””

“The only certainty is death.””

“If I could, I would stop the passage of time. But hour follows on hour, minute on minute, each second robbing me of a morsel of myself for the nothing of tomorrow. I shall never experience this moment again.””

“It is better to be unhappy in love than unhappy in marriage, but some people manage to be both.””

“We breathe, sleep, drink, eat, work and then die! The end of life is death. What do you long for? Love? A few kisses and you will be powerless. Money? What for? To gratify your desires. Glory? What coems after it all? Death! Death alone is certain.””