Guy de Maupassant · 520 pages
Rating: (861 votes)
“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.”
― Guy de Maupassant, quote from The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One
“Why does one love? How queer it is to see only one being in the world, to have only one thought in one's mind, only one desire in the heart, and only one name on the lips--a name which comes up continually, rising, like the water in a spring, from the depths of the soul to the lips, a name which one repeats over and over again, which one whispers ceaselessly, everywhere, like a prayer.”
― Guy de Maupassant, quote from The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One
“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.”
― Guy de Maupassant, quote from The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One
“When the first fine spring days come, and the earth awakes and assumes its garment of verdure, when the perfumed warmth of the air blows on our faces and fills our lungs, and even appears to penetrate to our heart, we feel vague longings for undefined happiness, a wish to run, to walk at random, to inhale the spring.”
― Guy de Maupassant, quote from The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One
“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.”
― Guy de Maupassant, quote from The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One
“But he asked himself now if he would not be disobeying God. And does not God permit love, since He surrounds it with such visible splendor?”
― Guy de Maupassant, quote from The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One
“And involuntarily I compared the childish sarcasm, the religious sarcasm of Voltaire with the irresistible irony of the German philosopher whose influence is henceforth ineffaceable.”
― Guy de Maupassant, quote from The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One
“We are all very much alike in France in this respect; we still remain knights, knights of love and fortune, since God has been abolished whose bodyguard we really were. But nobody can ever get woman out of our hearts; there she is, and there she will remain, and we love her, and shall continue to love her, and go on committing all kinds of follies on her account as long as there is a France on the map of Europe; and even if France were to be wiped off the map, there would always be Frenchmen left.”
― Guy de Maupassant, quote from The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One
“....and I gazed at these forms incomprehensible to me, but which revealed the immortal thoughts of the greatest shatterer of dreams who had ever dwelt on earth.”
― Guy de Maupassant, quote from The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant, Part One
Guy de Maupassant
Born place: in Dieppe, France
Born date August 5, 1850
See more on GoodReads
“Before I came to New York I lived here, in this mausoleum. I was nothing. I was dead. When I came to New York it was like a veil lifting. For the first time I felt I was alive, breathing.”
― Jacqueline Susann, quote from Valley of the Dolls
“You see what power is – holding someone else’s fear
in your hand and showing it to them”
― Amy Tan, quote from The Kitchen God's Wife
“I must make up my mind which is right – society or I.”
― Henrik Ibsen, quote from A Doll's House
“It is extremely interesting, then, to think about the meaning of the word ‘form’ as it applies to constructions of arbitrarily complex shapes. For instance, what is it that we respond to when we look at a painting and feel its beauty? Is if the ‘form’ of the lines and dots on our retina? Evidently it must be, for that is how it gets passed along to the analyzing mechanisms in our heads–but the complexity of the processing makes us feel that we are not merely looking at a two-dimensional surface; we are responding to some sort of inner meaning inside the picture, a multidimensional aspect trapped somehow inside those two dimensions. It is the word ‘meaning’ which is important here. Our minds contain interpreters which accept two-dimensional patterns and then ‘pull’ from them high-dimensional notions which are so complex that we cannot consciously describe them. The same can be said about how we respond to music, incidentally.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, quote from Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
“minute later Annabeth hit a slippery patch of moss and her foot slipped. Fortunately, she found something else to put it against. Unfortunately, that something was my face.”
― Rick Riordan, quote from Percy Jackson and the Olympians
The Forbidden Game
Medea
This Side of Paradis...
Son of the Shadows
Martin Eden
By the River Piedra...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
