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

He himself was one of your noisy roisterers, for whom life holds no greater pleasures than wine and bought women. Outside these two poles of existence, he understood nothing. Braggart, brawler, contemptuous of every living person, he despised the whole world from the heights of his ignorance.

— Guy de Maupassant

He seemed to have established in his mind an affinity between the two great passions of his life – pale ale and revolution – and assuredly he could not taste the one without dreaming of the other.

— Guy de Maupassant

How fathomless the mystery of the Unseen is! We cannot plumb its depths with our feeble senses - with eyes which cannot see the infinitely small or the infinitely great, nor anything too close or too distant, such as the beings who live on a star or the creatures which live in a drop of water... with ears that deceive us by converting vibrations of the air into tones that we can hear, for they are sprites which miraculously change movement into sound, a metamorphosis which gives birth to harmonies which turn the silent agitation of nature into song... with our sense of smell, which is poorer than any dog's... with our sense of taste, which is barely capable of detecting the age of a wine! Ah! If we had other senses which would work other miracles for us, how many more things would we not discover around us!

— Guy de Maupassant

I am lost! Someone has taken over my mind and is controlling it! Someone is in command of all my actions, movements, and thoughts. I am nothing inside, merely a spectator enslaved and terrified by everything I do.

— Guy de Maupassant

I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunder

— Guy de Maupassant

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

I had kissed her at odd times, in out of the way corners, in the manner of a mountain guide, nothing more.

— Guy de Maupassant

I have an immoderate passion for water; for the sea, though so vast, so restless, so beyond one's comprehension; for rivers, beautiful, yet fugitive and elusive; but especially for marshes, teeming with all that mysterious life of the creatures that haunt them. A marsh is a whole world within a world, a different world, with a life of its own, with its own permanent denizens, its passing visitors, its voices, its sounds, its own strange mystery.

— Guy de Maupassant

I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing

— Guy de Maupassant