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...

She stayed there, in her ball dress, without strength to go to bed, overwhelmed, on a chair, without a fire, without a thought.

Broad daylight does not encourage the apprehension of horror.

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.

Get black on white.

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...

Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governments.”[On Water]

Why is it a shame for me to cause them to die and try to exterminate them, tell me? You did not talk that way when you used to come to my house in Jeanne-d’Arc...

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

They were so absorbed in their plotting that they did not hear Boule de Suif return. But the Comte’s whispered ‘shh!’ made them all look up. There she was. A sudden silence fell, and at...

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

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

Any government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship’s captain has to avoid a shipwreck.”[On Water]

On aime sa mère presque sans le savoir, et on ne prend conscience de toute la profondeur des racines de cet amour qu au moment de la séparation dernière.

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.

I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt.”[As quoted in Pol Neveux’s introduction, Guy De Maupassant: A Study]

It was one of those bitter mornings when the whole of nature is shiny, brittle, and hard, like crystal. The trees, decked out in frost, seem to have sweated ice; the earth resounds beneath one’s...

By Jove, it’s great! Walk along the streets on some spring morning. The little women, daintily tripping along, seem to blossom out like flowers. What a delightful, charming sight! The dainty perfume of violet is...

Music, this complex and mysterious act, precise as algebra and vague as a dream, this art made out of mathematics and air, is simply the result of the strange properties of a little membrane. If...

I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing

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...

Madeleine in her turn stared at him steadily, straight into his eyes, in a profound, strange way, as if seeking to read something there, as if seeking to discover there that hidden part of a...

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...

Envy, bitter envy, was permeating his soul drop by drop, like a poison that tainted all his pleasures and made his life hateful.

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...

The great artists are those who impose their personal vision upon humanity.

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

Yes, this is the only good thing in life: love! To hold a woman you love in your arms! That is the ultimate in human happiness.

By nature independent, gay, even exuberant, seductively responsive and given to those spontaneous sallies that sparkle in the conversation of certain daughters of Paris who seem to have inhaled since childhood the pungent breath of...

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,...

There were some children round him playing in the dust on the paths. They had long fair hair, and with very earnest faces and solemn attention were making little mountains of sand so as to...

Everything I see reminds me that in a few days I shall no longer see it… It’s horrible… I shall see nothing more… nothing of what exists… the smallest objects that we use… glasses… plates…...

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...

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...

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....

She thought constantly about Paris and avidly read all the society pages in the papers. Their accounts of receptions, celebrations, the clothes worn, and all the accompanying delights enjoyed, whetted her appetite still further. Above...

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.

There are some delightful places in this world which have a sensual charm for the eyes. One loves them with a physical love. We people who are attracted by the countryside cherish fond memories of...

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.

Get married, my friend, you don’t know what it means to live alone, at my age. Nowadays feeling alone fills me with appalling anguish; being alone at home, by the fire, in the evening. It...

Charming, charming,’ the lawyer said at intervals.

Language dazzles and deceives because it is masked by faces, because we see it emerging from the lips, because lips please and eyes beguile. But words on paper, black on white, reveal the naked soul.

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...

The only certainty is death.

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.

Entre pauvres gens, faut bien qu’on s’aide … C’est les grands qui font la guerre.

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?

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

It was then between one o’clock in the morning and half-past that hour; the sky soon cleared a bit before me, and the lunar crescent peeped out from behind the clouds – that sad crescent...