"You must render: never report."
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Quote collection
Guy de Maupassant quotes (page 4 of 5)
85 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Champagne... the wine of kings, the king of wines"
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"And taking her friend’s hand, she put it on her breast, on that firm round covering of a woman’s heart which the male often finds so satisfying that he makes no attempt to find what lies beneath it."
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"We are accustomed to use our eyes only with the memory of what other people before us have thought about the object we are looking at."
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"Ale, not beer, in a pewter mug was comme il faut, the only thing for a gentleman of letters, worthy of the name, to drink."
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"Military men are the scourges of the world."
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"In the East men know panic, but they do not know what fright is."
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"Killing is decreed by law but nature loves eternal youth. Whatever she does, however unconscious and unfeeling the act, she seems to cry out: 'Quick! Quick! Quick!' And the more she destroys, the more she is renewed."
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"To lie about a far country is easy"
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"War! When I but think of this word, I feel bewildered, as though they were speaking to me of sorcery, of the Inquisition, of a distant, finished, abominable, monstrous, unnatural thing. When they speak to us of cannibals, we smile proudly, as we proclaim our superiority to these savages. Who are the real savages? Those who struggle in order to eat those whom they vanquish, or those who struggle merely to kill?"
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"Love always has its price, come whence it may."
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"To contest an author's right to create a poetic or realistic work is to want to force him to change his temperament, challenge his originality, refuse to allow him to use the eye and the intelligence nature has given him."
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"Whatever one wishes to say, there is one noun only by which to express it, one verb only to give it life, one adjective only which will describe it. One must search until one has discovered them, this noun, this verb, this adjective, and never rest content with approximations, never resort to trickery, however happy, or to vulgarism, in order to dodge the difficulty."
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"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?"
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"Night was a very different matter. It was dense, thicker than the very walls, and it was empty, so black, so immense that within it you could brush against appalling things and feel roaming and prowling around a strange, mysterious horror."
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"There are in France some fifty thousand young men of good birth and fairly well off who are encouraged to live a life of complete idleness. They must either cease to exist or must come to see that there can be no happiness, no health even, without regular daily labor of some sort... The need of work is in me."
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"The only certainty is death."
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"Broad daylight does not encourage the apprehension of horror."
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"Legitimized love always despises its easygoing brother."
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"I told myself 'Everything is a being! The shout that passes into the air is an entity like an animal, since it is born, produces a movement, and is again transformed, in order to die. So the fearful mind that believes in incorporeal beings is not wrong. What are they?"
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