Guy de Maupassant Quotes

Man is a universe within himself.

A complete autobiography would indeed be a picture of the outer and inner universe photographed upon one little life's consciousness. For does not the whole world, seen and unseen, go to the making up of every human being?

My family, in a way, gives me a reference as to who I am as an individual, and my work gives me a reference as to who I am as a Homo sapiens. I think that's a very perfect match, in my view.

I can explain my body and my brain, but there's something more. I can't explain my own existence - what makes me a unique human being.

A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

I describe myself as a human being.

Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.

The man who has no inner-life is a slave to his surroundings.

Guess what? Human beings are complex.

The more we become civilized, the more we simultaneously understand our need to be virtuous and our need to understand our experiences on a subconscious level.

I--this thought which is called I--is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax.

I am a little world made cunningly.

To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?

Though the eye is small, the soul which sees through it is greater and vaster than all the things which it perceives. In fact, it is so great that it includes all objects, however large or numerous, within itself. For it is not so much that you are within the cosmos as that the cosmos is within you.

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.

What is an "I", and why are such things found (at least so far) only in association with, as poet Russell Edson once wonderfully phrased it, "teetering bulbs of dread and dream" - that is, only in association with certain kinds of gooey lumps encased in hard protective shells mounted atop mobile pedestals that roam the world on pairs of slightly fuzzy, jointed stilts?

There is no person without a world.

Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life. This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.

You believe that you live in the world, where in fact the world lives within you.

your soul is an inner something that is another you and hardly anybody knows what it's really thinkin' except you.

Where do I come into all of this? Am I just some animal or dog?' And that started them off govoreeting real loud and throwing slovos at me. So I creeched louder still, creeching: 'Am I just to be like a clockwork orange?

You yourself are even another little world and have within you the sun and the moon and also the stars.

Man is but the place where I stand.

You should avoid seeing too much of yourself anywhere: in the outside world, in others, in the imagined worlds that give you shelter.

There was Layla in the fullness of her lips, Lulu in the thick waves of her hair, Lu Xin in the intensity of her hazel eyes, Lucia in their twinkle. She was not alone. Maybe she never would be alone again. There, in the mirror, was every incarnation of Lucinda staring back at her and wondering, "What is to become of us? What about our history, and our love?