Guy de Maupassant

“Vraiment, un homme sans moustache n'est plus un homme.”

“cette oppression douloureuse, ce malaise de l’ame que laisse en nous lé chagrin sur lequel on a dormi. Il semble que lé malheur, dont lé choc nous a seulement heurte la veille, se soit glisse, durant nôtre repos, dans nôtre chair elle-meme, qu’il meurtrit et fatigue comme une fièvre.هذا الضيق المؤلم، إنزعاج الروح الذي ننام عليه يترك فينا الأسى. ويبدو أن صدمة التعاسة التي ضربتنا بالأمس تنزلق خلال راحتنا، في لحمنا نفسه فتُمرض وتًتعب كالحمى.”

“A boat with an awning and containing four women came slowly downstream towards them. The woman at the oars was small, lean, and past her prime. She wore her hair pinned up inside an oilskin hat. Opposite her a big blonde dressed in a man's jacket was lying on her back at the bottom of the boat with a foot resting on the thwart on either side of the oarswoman. The blonde was smoking a cigarette and with each jerk of the oars her bosom and belly quivered. At the very stern of the boat under the awning two beautiful, tall, slender girls, one blonde and the other brunette, sat with their arms round each other's waists watching their two companions.A shout went up from La Grenouillere: "Aye-aye! Lesbos!" and suddenly a wild clamor broke out. In the terrifying scramble to see, glasses were knocked over and people started climbing on the tables. Everyone began to chant "Lesbos! Lesbos! Lesbos!" The words merged into a vague howl before suddenly starting up again, rising into the air, filling the plain beyond, resounding in the dense foliage of the tall surrounding trees and echoing in the distance as if aimed at the sun itself.”

“It is the encounters with people that make life worth living.”

“Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It's the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“It is love that is sacred," she said." Listen, child, to an old woman who has seen three generations, and who has had a long experience of men and women. Marriage and love have nothing in common. We marry to found a family, and we form families in order to constitute society. Society cannot dispense with marriage. If society is a chain, each family is a link in that chain. In order to weld those links, we always seek metals of the same order. When we marry, we must bring together suitable conditions; we must combine fortunes, unite similiar races and aim at the common interest, which is riches and children. We marry only once, my child, because the world requires us to do so, but we love twenty times in one lifetime because nature has made us like this. Marriage, you see, is law and love is an instinct which impels us, sometimes along a straight, and sometimes along a devious path. The world has made laws to combat our instincts- it was necessary to make them; but our instincts are always stronger, and we ought not to resist them too much, because they come from God; while laws come from men. If we did not perfume life with love, as much love as possible,darling, as we put sugar into drugs for children, nobody would care to take it just as it is.”

“A proč vůbec se chovat urážlivě k někomu, na kom jsme úplně závislí? To by nebylo vůbec hrdinství, nýbrž jen nerozvážná smělost.”

“Elle se sentait noyée dans le mépris de ces gredins honnêtes qui l'avaient sacrifiée d'abord, rejetée ensuite, comme une chose malpropre et inutile.”

“Elle se sentait en même temps indignée contre tous ses voisins, et humiliée d'avoir cedé, souillée par les baisers de ce Prussien entre les bras duquel on l'avait hypocritement jetée.”

“Entre pauvres gens, faut bien qu'on s'aide ... C'est les grands qui font la guerre.”

“Bientôt la conversation reprit entre les trois dames, que la présence de cette fille avait rendues subitement amies, presque intimes. Elles devaient faire, leur semblait-il, comme un faisceau de leurs dignités d'épouses en face de cette vendue sans vergogne; car l'amour légal le prend toujours de haut avec son libre confrère. ”

“Ces six personnes formaient le fond de la voiture, le côté de la société rentée, sereine et forte, des honnêtes gens autorisés qui ont de la Religion et des Principes.”

“Un rideau de flocons blancs ininterrompu miroitait sans cesse en descendant vers la terre; il effaçait les formes, poudrait les choses d'une mousse de glace; et l'on n'entendait plus, dans le grand silence de la ville calme et ensevelie sous l'hiver, que ce froissement vague, innommable et flottant de la neige qui tombe, plutôt sensation que bruit , entremêlement d'atomes légers qui semblaient emplir l'espace, couvrir le monde.”

“Les vases du fleuve ensevelissaient ces vengeances obscures, sauvages et légitimes, héroïsmes inconnus, attaques muettes, plus périlleuses que les batailles au grand jour et sans le retentissement de la gloire.Car la haine de l'Étranger arme toujours quelques Intrépides prêts à mourir pour une Idée.”

“Car la même sensation reparaît chaque fois l'ordre établi de choses est renversé, que la sécurité n'existe plus, que tout ce que protégeait les lois des hommes oub celles de la nature, se trouve à la merci d'une brutalité inconsciente et féroce.”

“Do women feel anything more keenly than curiosity? No, they will go to any lengths to find out, to know,to feel, what they have always dreamed of! Once their excited curiosity has been aroused, women will stoop to anything, commit any folly, take any risks. They stop at nothing. I am speaking of women who are real women, who operate on three different levels. Superficially cool and rational, they have three secret compartments: the first is constantly full of womanly fret and anxiety; the second is a sort of innocent guile, like the fearsome sophistry of the self-righteous; and the last is filled with an engaging dishonesty, a charming deviousness, a consummate duplicity, with all those perverse qualities in fact that can drive a foolish, unwary love to suicide, but which by others may be judged quite delightful. ”

“I love the night passionately. I love it as I love my country, or my mistress, with an instinctive, deep, and unshakeable love. 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. Skylarks sing in the sunshine, the blue sky, the warm air, in the fresh morning light. The owl flies by night, a dark shadow passing through the darkness; he hoots his sinister, quivering hoot, as though he delights in the intoxicating black immensity of space. ”

“il ne faut chercher que la vérité, sans s'occuper de la morale enseignée, orthodoxe et officielle ; de la morale, cette prétendue loi naturelle, indéfiniment variable, facultative, cette chose dosée différemment pour chaque pays, appréciée de façon nouvelle par chaque expert, prêtre ou législateur, et sans cesse modifiée par tout le monde.”

“She was the temptress who had ensnared the first man, and who still continued her work at damnation; she was the being who is feeble, dangerous, mysteriously troubling. And even more than her body of perdition, he hated her loving soul.”

“Ich musste mich zusammennehmen! Ich wollte einfach keine Furcht mehr empfinden! Aber so fest ich mir's vornahm, immer regte sich ein zweites Ich, und dieses zweite Ich - hatte Furcht. Ich fragte mich, was es eigentlich zu fürchten gäbe. Mein tapferes Ich spottete über das feige Ich. Nie habe ich so wie an diesem Tage den Gegensatz der beiden Wesen verspürt, die in uns wohnen. Das eine will, das andere widerstrebt, und wechselnd haben sie die Oberhand.”

“Les paroles d'amour, qui sont toujours les mêmes, prennent le goût des lèvres dont elles sortent.”

“We are, on earth, two distinct races. Those who have need of others, whom others amuse, engage soothe, whom solitude harasses, pains, stupefies, like the movement of a terrible glacier or the traversing of the desert; and those, on the contrary, whom others weary, tire, bore, silently torture, whom isolation calms and bathes in the repose of independency, and plunges into the humors of their own thoughts. In fine, there is here a normal, physical phenomenon. Some are constituted to live a life outside of themselves, others, to live a life within themselves. As for me, my exterior associations are abruptly and painfully short-lived, and, as they reach their limits, I experience in my whole body and in my whole intelligence an intolerable uneasiness. ”

“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.”

“Broad daylight does not encourage the apprehension of horror.”

“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!”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Хүмүүс бий болсон үеэсээ эхлэн үүрд ганцаардан хоригдсон хоригдол болсон зүрх сэтгэл цохилон байдаг бүрхэвчийг нэвтлэн урахыг хий дэмий цөхрөлтгүй оролдон, гар хөл, уруул ам, харц, тачаадан дагжсан нүцгэн биеэрээ, янаглалд сульдсан хайр сэтгэлээрээ дараа нь бас л хаягдан ганцаардах өөр нэгэнд амьдралыг өгөх гэж хий дэмий хүч тавьдaг.”

“One sometimes weeps over one's illusions with as much bitterness as over a death.”

“The secret is not to betray your ignorance. Just maneuver, avoid the quicksands and obstacles, and the rest can be found in a dictionary.”

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

“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.”

“breathing, sleeping, drinking, eating, working, dreaming, everything we do is dying. to live, in fact, is to die.”

“Military men are the scourges of the world.”

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

“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?”

“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?”

“Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.”

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

“Why not other elements besides fire, air, earth and water? There are four of them, just four, those foster parents of beings! What a pity! Why aren't there forty elements instead, or four hundred, or four thousand? How paltry everything is, how miserly, how wretched! Stingily given, aridly invented, heavily made!Why not other elements besides fire, air, earth and water? There are four of them, just four, those foster parents of beings! What a pity! Why aren't there forty elements instead, or four hundred, or four thousand? How paltry everything is, how miserly, how wretched! Stingily given, aridly invented, heavily made!”

“Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms”

“I said, 'If other beings besides us exist on Earth, why didn't we meet them a long time ago?”

“Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched."[My Uncle Sosthenes]”

“Get black on white.”

“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.”

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