Guy De Maupassant: Quotes about life

“You've never lived until you've almost died. For those who have fought for it, life has a flavor the protected shall never know.”

Guy De Maupassant

Life

“I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt.”

Guy De Maupassant

As quoted in "Guy De Maupassant : A Study" by Pol Neveux, in Original Short Stories http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3090

Life

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

Guy De Maupassant book Suicides

"Suicides"

Life , World , Universe , Memory

“There is only one good thing in life, and that is love.”

Guy De Maupassant

"The Love of Long Ago"
Source: The Complete Short Stories of de Maupassant
Context: 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.

Good Night , Love , Life

“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 Bel-Ami

Source: Bel-Ami

Life , Death , Feeling , Happiness

“We breathe, sleep, drink, eat, work and then die! The end of life is death. What do you long for? Love? A few kisses and you will be powerless. Money? What for? To gratify your desires. Glory? What coems after it all? Death! Death alone is certain.”

Guy De Maupassant Bel-Ami

Source: Bel-Ami

Love , Life , Death , Money

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

Guy De Maupassant

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

Life , People

“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

"The Love of Long Ago"

Love , Life

“A man forced to spend his life without ever having the right, without ever finding the time, to shut himself up all alone, no matter where, to think, to reflect, to work, to dream? Ah! my dear boy, a key, the key of a door which one can lock — this is happiness, mark you, the only happiness!”

Guy De Maupassant

"The Question of Latin"

Life , Dreams , Boy , Thinking

“What would have happened if she had not lost that necklace? Who knows? who knows? How strange and changeful is life! How small a thing is needed to make or ruin us!”

Guy De Maupassant

Variant translation:
What would have happened if she had not lost that necklace? Who knows? Who knows? How singular life is, how changeable! What a little thing it takes to save you or to lose you.
La Parure (The Necklace) (1884)

Life , Change

“I have come to the conclusion that the bed comprehends our whole life; for we were bom in it, we live in it, and we shall die in it.”

Guy De Maupassant

"The Bed"

Life

“There are in France some fifty thousand young men of good birth and fairly well off who are encouraged to live a life of complete idleness. They must either cease to exist or must come to see that there can be no happiness, no health even, without regular daily labor of some sort … The need of work is in me.”

Guy De Maupassant

As quoted in Contemporary Portraits (1920) by Frank Harris, p. 263

Life , Men , Health , Birth