How weak our mind is; how quickly it is terrified and unbalanced as soon as we are confronted with a small, incomprehensible fact. Instead of dismissing the problem with: "We do not understand because we cannot find the cause," we immediately imagine terrible mysteries and supernatural powers.

Guy de Maupassant

Categorized in : Facts Mind Causes

You have the army of mediocrities followed by the multitude of fools. As the mediocrities and the fools always form the immense majority, it is impossible for them to elect an intelligent government.

Guy de Maupassant

army government intelligent

To love very much is to love inadequately; we love-that is all. Love cannot be modified without being nullified. Love is a short word but it contains everything. Love means the body, the soul, the life, the entire being. We feel love as we feel the warmth of our blood, we breathe love as we breathe the air, we hold it in ourselves as we hold our thoughts. Nothing more exists for us. Love is not a word; it is a wordless state indicated by four letters.

Guy de Maupassant

air love mean

Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.

Guy de Maupassant

perfect giving memories

Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.

Guy de Maupassant

soul white life

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

Guy de Maupassant

fear past

Travel, like dreams, is a door that opens from the real world into a world that is yet to be discovered

Guy de Maupassant

real dream doors

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

Guy de Maupassant

sick body flesh

Love is always love, come whence it may. A heart that beats at your approach, an eye that weeps when you go away are things so rare, so sweet, so precious that they must never be despised.

Guy de Maupassant

eye heart sweet

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

Guy de Maupassant

life-worth-living worth-living encounters

Of all the passions, the only one that seems respectable to me is the passion for food

Guy de Maupassant

passion seems respectable

There is only one good thing in life, and that is love. And how you misunderstand it! how you spoil it! You treat it as something solemn like a sacrament, or something to be bought, like a dress.

Guy de Maupassant

things-in-life good-things dresses

Abstinence is the worst form of perversion.

Guy de Maupassant

worst form abstinence

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.

Guy de Maupassant

ends life-is long

A lawful kiss is never worth as much as a stolen one.

Guy de Maupassant

stolen kissing

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.

Guy de Maupassant

hours tomorrow moments

Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.

Guy de Maupassant

patriotic eggs war

I love the night passionately... I love it with all my senses: I love to see it, I love to breathe it in, I love to open my ears to its silence, I love my whole body to be caressed by its blackness.

Guy de Maupassant

silence ears night

Whether we are describing a king, an assassin, a thief, an honest man, a prostitute, a nun, a young girl, or a stallholder in a market, it is always ourselves that we are describing.

Guy de Maupassant

girl kings writing

Great minds that are healthy are never considered geniuses, while this sublime qualification is lavished on brains that are often inferior but are slightly touched by madness.

Guy de Maupassant

sublime healthy brain

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

Guy de Maupassant

strange dream art