Stendhal Quotes

She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?

Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.

If you don't love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us.

Who knows whether it is not true that phosphorus and mind are not the same thing?

The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.

A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.

A good book is an event in my life.

A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader's soul.

Love is like fever; it comes and goes without the will having any part of the process.

The idea which tyrants find most useful is the idea of God.

A woman of generous character will sacrifice her life a thousand times over for her lover, but will break with him for ever over a question of pride.

God's only excuse is that he does not exist.

Life is very short, and it ought not to be spent crawling at the feet of miserable scoundrels.

Only great minds can afford a simple style.

To describe happiness is to diminish it.

All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.

On a cold winter morning a cigar fortifies the soul.

A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road.

I love her beauty, but I fear her mind.

Love has always been the most important business in my life; I should say the only one.

Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.

The sight of anything extremely beautiful, in nature or in art, brings back the memory of what one loves, with the speed of lightning.

Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.

Every true passion thinks only of itself.

Love is like a fever which comes and goes quite independently of the will. ... there are no age limits for love.

A strange effect of marriage, such as the nineteenth century has made it! The boredom of married life inevitably destroys love, when love has preceded marriage. And yet, as a philosopher has observed, it speedily brings about, among people who are rich enough not to have to work, an intense boredom with all quiet forms of enjoyment. And it is only dried up hearts, among women, that it does not predispose to love.

People happy in love have an air of intensity.

In love, unlike most other passions, the recollection of what you have had and lost is always better than what you can hope for in the future.

Life is too short, and the time we waste in yawning never can be regained.

In our calling, we have to choose; we must make our fortune either in this world or in the next, there is no middle way.

Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us.

The man of genius is he and he alone who finds such joy in his art that he will work at it come hell or high water.

This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.

If you want to be witty, work on your character and say what you think on every occasion.

Ah, Sir, a novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies, at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shews the mire, and you blame the mirror! Rather blame that high road upon which the puddle lies, still more the inspector of roads who allows the water to gather and the puddle to form.

The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears.

Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.

To be loved at first sight, a man should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in his face.

Power, after love, is the first source of happiness.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

Women prefer emotions to reasoning.

Conversationis like the table of contents of a dull book.... All the greatest subjects of human thought are proudly displayedin it. Listen to it for three minutes, and you ask yourself which is more striking, the emphasis of the speaker or his shocking ignorance.

The more one pleases everybody, the less one pleases profoundly.

Why not make an end of it all?... My life is a succession of griefs and bitter feelings.... What is death?... A very small matter,when all is said; only a fool would be concerned about it.

The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.

Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore.

A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.

When a man leaves his mistress, he runs the risk of being betrayed two or three times daily.