Guy de Maupassant Quotes

And what's a life? - a weary pilgrimage, Whose glory in one day doth fill the stage With childhood, manhood, and decrepit age.

The cliche is that life is a mountain. You go up, reach the top and then go down.

Life's up and down from the time you get here to the time you leave.

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

You get to a certain point in your life where you get closer to the end of your life than the beginning, and it colors your life, in a way.

I am really curious about life, about why we are all here. I notice my skin is ageing, things are changing, I've seen people dying, so that's the train we are all on.

We're all travelers in this world. From the sweet grass to the packing house. Birth 'til death. We travel between the eternities.

Time indeed has very little to do with living except at its beginning or near its end.

Why is youth so short and age so long?

Life is like a book that never ends. Chapters close, but not the book itself.

I don't want to be married. I don't know - it sounds crazy, but in my mind, it's all connected. You get married, you have kids, you grow old, then you die. Somehow, it seems to me, if you didn't get married, you wouldn't die.

We arrive at the various stages of life quite as novices.

Life is a kind of sleep: old men sleep longest, nor begin to wake but when they are to die.

The romance of life begins and ends with two blank pages. Age and extreme old age.

A person's life from infancy to old age is nothing else than an advance from the world towards heaven, the last stage of which is death; the actual transition from one life to the next.

The steps a man takes from the day of his birth until that of his death trace in time an inconcievable figure. The Divine Mind intuitively grasps that form immediately, as men do a triangle.

To those who view the voyage of life from the port of departure the bark that has accomplished any considerable distance appears already in close approach to the farther shore.

I've always thought that the most extraordinary special effect you could do is to buy a child at the moment of its birth, sit it on a little chair and say, "You'll have three score years and ten," and take a photograph every minute. "And we'll watch you and photograph you for ten years after you die, then we'll run the film." Wouldn't that be extraordinary? We'd watch this thing get bigger and bigger, and flower to become extraordinary and beautiful, then watch it crumble, decay, and rot.

Babies haven't any hair; Old men's heads are just as bare; between the cradle and the grave lie a haircut and a shave.

In the morn of life we are alert, we are heated in its noon, and only in its decline do we repose.

The seven ages of man: spills, drills, thrills, bills, ills, pills and wills.

Over and over, we start our own tales, compose our own stories, whether our lives are short or long. Until at last all our beginnings come down to just one end, and the tale of who we are is done.

The story of my recent life.' I like that phrase. It makes more sense than 'the story of my life', because we get so many lives between birth and death. A life to be a child. A life to come of age. A life to wander, to settle, to fall in love, to parent, to test our promise, to realize our mortality- and in some lucky cases, to do something after that realization.

I figure if Doc is right about the time I have left,I should wrap up my adolescence in the next few days, get into my early productive stages about the third week of school, go through my midlife crisis during Martin Luther King Jr's birthday, redouble my efforts at productivity and think about my legacy, say, Easter, and start cashing in my 401(k)s a couple weeks before Memorial Day.

Growing up leads to growing old and then to dying And dying to me don't sound like all that much fun