After all, life is never so jolly or so miserable as people seem to think.

— Guy de Maupassant

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!

— Guy de Maupassant

....and I gazed at these forms incomprehensible to me, but which revealed the immortal thoughts of the greatest shattered of dreams who had ever dwelt on earth.

— Guy de Maupassant

And involuntarily I compared the childish sarcasm, the religious sarcasm of Voltaire with the irresistible irony of the German philosopher whose influence is henceforth ineffable.

— Guy de Maupassant

Any government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a ships

— Guy de Maupassant

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

— Guy de Maupassant

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

— Guy de Maupassant

Broad daylight does not encourage the apprehension of horror.

— Guy de Maupassant

But a vague jealousy, one of those dormant jealousies that develop between brothers or sisters almost unnoticed until maturity, only to burst out when one of them marries or has a stroke of good fortune, kept them constantly on the alert in a fraternal, unaggressive hostility. They did love each other, yet they kept an eye on each other.

— Guy de Maupassant

By nature independent, gay, even exuberant, seductively responsive and given to those spontaneous sallies that sparkle in the conversation of certain daughters of Paris who seem to have inhaled since childhood the pungent breath of the boulevards laden with the nightly laughter of audiences leaving theaters, Madame de Burne's five years of bondage had nonetheless endowed her with a singular timidity which mingled oddly with her youthful mettle, a great fear of saying too much, of going too be far, along with a fierce yearning for emancipation and a firm resolve never again to compromise her freedom.

— Guy de Maupassant