Stendhal Quotations

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

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

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

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

Only great minds can afford a simple style.

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

True love makes the thought of death frequent, easy, without terrors; it merely becomes the standard of comparison, the price one would pay for many things.

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

People happy in love have an air of intensity.

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

I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.

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

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

People who have been made to suffer by certain things cannot be reminded of them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure, even that to be found in reading a story.

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.

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

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

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

A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness.

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

Friendship has its illusions no less than love.

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.

Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion.

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

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

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.

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

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.

The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.

The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.

The great majority of men, especially in France, both desire and possess a fashionable woman, much in the way one might own a fine horse - as a luxury befitting a young man.

If you think of paying court to the men in power, your eternal ruin is assured.

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

What is really beautiful must always be true.

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

It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.

Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all.

The more a race is governed by its passions, the less it has acquired the habit of cautious and reasoned argument, the more intense will be its love of music.

Far less envy in America than in France, and far less wit.

Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.

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

The English are, I think the most obtuse and barbarous people in the world

Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.

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

The pleasures and the cares of the luckiest ambition, even of limitless power, are nothing next to the intimate happiness that tenderness and love give. I am man before being a prince, and when I have the good fortune to be in love, my mistress addresses a man and not a prince.

Jean Jacques Rousseauis nothing but a fool in my eyes when he takes it upon himself to criticise society; he did not understand it, and approached it with the heart of an upstart flunkey.... For all his preaching a Republic and the overthrow of monarchical titles, the upstart is mad with joy if a Duke alters the course of his after-dinner stroll to accompany one of his friends.

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

Great ladies are no more spiteful than the average rich woman; but one acquires in their society a greater susceptibility, and feels more profoundly andmore irremediably, their unpleasant remarks.

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.

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.

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 first virtue of a young man today - that is, for the next fifty years perhaps, as long as we live in fear, and religion has regained its powers - is to be incapable of enthusiasm and not to have much in the way of brains.

I do not feel I have wisdom enough yet to love what is ugly.

Chélan had acted as imprudently for Julien as he had for himself. He had given him the habit of reasoning correctly, and of not being put off by empty words, but he had neglected to tell him that this habit was a crime in the person of no importance, since every piece of logical reasoning is offensive.

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

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

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

A good book is an event in my life.

Our true passions are selfish.

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.

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

A very small matter, when all is said; only a fool would be concerned about it.

When intimacy followed love in Italy there were no longer any vain pretensions between two lovers.

Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.

Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.

To describe happiness is to diminish it.

Sometimes the impact of Mozart's music is so immediate that the vision in the mind remains blurred and incomplete, while the soul seems to be directly invaded, drenched in wave upon wave of melancholy.

Love is a well from which we can drink only as much as we have put in, and the stars that shine from it are only our eyes looking in.

Faith, I am no such fool; everyone for himself in this desert of selfishness which is called life.

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

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

It is from cowardice and not from want of enlightenment that we do not read in our own hearts.

...one of the traits of genius is not to drag its thought through the rut worn by vulgar minds.

In matters of sentiment, the public has very crude ideas; and the most shocking fault of women is that they make the public the supreme judge of their lives.

Perhaps men who cannot love passionately are those who feel the effect of beauty most keenly; at any rate this is the strongest impression women can make on them.

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.

The only unhappiness is a life of boredom.

Every great action is extreme when it is undertaken. Only after it has been accomplished does it seem possible to those creatures of more common stuff.

It is difficult to escape from the prevailing disease of one's generation.

It is with blows dealt by public contempt that a husband kills his wife in the nineteenth century; it is by shutting the doors ofall the drawing-rooms in her face.

At a distance, we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight.

I love her beauty, but I fear her mind.

The tyranny of public opinion (and what an opinion!) is as fatuous in the small towns of France as it is in the United States of America.

For the future, I shall rely only upon those elements of my character which I have tested. Who would ever have said that I should find pleasure in shedding tears? That I should love the man who proves to me that I am nothing more than a fool?

Love born in the brain is more spirited, doubtless, than true love, but it has only flashes of enthusiasm; it knows itself too well, it criticizes itself incessantly; so far from banishing thought, it is itself reared only upon a structure of thought.

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.

I used to think of deathlike I suppose soldiers think of it: it was a possible thing that I could well avoid by my skill.

I think being condemned to death is the only real distinction," said Mathilde. "It is the only thing which cannot be bought.

Wounded pride can take a rich young man far who is surrounded by flatterers since birth.

Beauty is nothing but a promise of happiness.

I have a bad memory for facts.

This religion takes away the courage of thinking of unusual things and prohibits self-examination above all as the most egregiousof sins.... It is one step away from protestantism.

Now that the steam engine rules the world, a title is an absurdity, still I am all dressed up in this title. It will crush me if Ido not support it. The title attracts attention to myself.

Because one has little fear of shocking vanity in Italy, people adopt an intimate tone very quickly and discuss personal things.

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

If I meet the Christian Deity, I am lost: He is a tyrant and as such, is full of ideas of vengeance; His Bible speaks of nothing but fearful punishments. I never loved Him! I could never even believe that anyone did love Him sincerely. He is devoid of pity.... He will punish me in some abominable manner.

War was then no longer this noble and unified outburst of souls in love with glory that he had imagined from Napoleon's proclamations.

On a cold winter morning a cigar fortifies the soul.

To find love in Paris you must go down among those classes where the absence of education and of vanity, and the struggle for bare necessities, have allowed more energy to survive.