Guy de Maupassant Quotes

Middle age is the way you would feel about summer if you knew there would never be another spring.

The calendar has a magic that makes us imagine a memory can be resurrected and revived, but nothing returns.

Not Heav'n itself upon the past has pow'r; But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

Change is a measure of time and, in the autumn, time seems speeded up. What was is not and never again will be; what is is change.

Drink up, boys, drink up and don’t worry, if we finish this bottle we’ll go down and buy another one. Of course, it won’t be the same as the one we’ve got now, but it’ll still be better than nothing. Ah, what a shame they don’t make Los Suicidas mezcal anymore, what a shame that time pases, don’t you think? what a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us.

No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.

I notice the silvery hair at his temples with a tinge of sadness. Why do parents grow old? Life is a castle of lies slowly dismantled by the passage of time. I regret not spending more time looking at the people I love.

Time sneaks up on you like a windshield on a bug.

Time is flying never to return.

We have been conditioned to see the passing of time as an adversary.

How did it get so late so soon? Its night before its afternoon. December is here before its June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?

Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?

Time is the one thing I can't get back and can't give back to you.

Diamonds are forever, my youth is not.

What is it one yearns for? It is to be able to do a thing for the first time again. And that is impossible.

My first memory was of stories about the past - a past that, according to the storytellers, was superior in every way to the life then being lived. It didn't take me long, however, to understand that the present was all we had, for the past was gone, and nothing could be done about it.

Time passes irrevocably.

I shall soon be six-and-twenty. Is there anything in the future that can possibly console us for not being always twenty-five?

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

The notion of time bothers me. You look at thirty-year-old photographs and realize how the time has passed.

The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God, the herdsman goads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet.

There is no past that we can bring back to us by the longing for it.

You can't be 24 again; you can't be new when you're 40 years old.

I used to love getting older.

Time is something you can't get back.