Stendhal Quotes
"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."
- Stendhal
(Related: Politics, Work, Literary)
"Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it."
- Stendhal
(Related: Pleasure)
"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."
- Stendhal
(Related: People, Horror, Pleasure, Reading)
"People happy in love have an air of intensity."
- Stendhal
(Related: Love, People)
"Our true passions are selfish."
- Stendhal
"Only great minds can afford a simple style."
- Stendhal
(Related: Style)
"If you don't love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us."
- Stendhal
(Related: Love)
"Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion."
- Stendhal
(Related: Fashion, Nothing)
"She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?"
- Stendhal
"Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness."
- Stendhal
(Related: Hypocrisy, Mathematics)
"Love has always been the most important business in my life, I should say the only one."
- Stendhal
(Related: Business, Love, Life)
"Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge."
- Stendhal
(Related: Art, Science, Logic)
"It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now."
- Stendhal
(Related: Nobility, Now, Style, Will, Writers, Years)
"If you think of paying court to the men in power, your eternal ruin is assured."
- Stendhal
(Related: Men, Power, Court, Ruin)
"One can acquire everything in solitude except character."
- Stendhal
(Related: Character, Solitude)
"The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears."
- Stendhal
(Related: Love)
"Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion."
- Stendhal
(Related: Women, Emotion)
"What is really beautiful must always be true."
- Stendhal
"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."
- Stendhal
(Related: Death, Love, Thought)
"To describe happiness is to diminish it."
- Stendhal
(Related: Happiness)
"To be loved at first sight, a man should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in his face."
- Stendhal
(Related: Time, First, Man, Pity, Respect, Sight)
"This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom."
- Stendhal
(Related: Age, Boredom, Cure)
"Power, after love, is the first source of happiness."
- Stendhal
(Related: Happiness, Love, Power, First)
"The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years."
- Stendhal
(Related: Years)
"Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all."
- Stendhal
"The more one pleases everybody, the less one pleases profoundly."
- Stendhal
"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."
- Stendhal
(Related: Love, Music, Habit, Argument, Race, Will)
"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."
- Stendhal
(Related: Art, Work, Genius, Hell, Joy, Man, Water, Will)
"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."
- Stendhal
(Related: Men, Desire, France, Luxury, Majority, Man, Woman)
"The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth."
- Stendhal
(Related: Earth, Events, Present, Race)
"The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent."
- Stendhal
(Related: Ability, First)
"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."
- Stendhal
(Related: Love, Hope, Future)
"The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same."
- Stendhal
(Related: Sheep)
"A novel is a mirror carried along a main road."
- Stendhal
(Related: Road)
"Life is too short, and the time we waste in yawning never can be regained."
- Stendhal
(Related: Life, Time, Waste)
"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."
- Stendhal
(Related: Light, Woman)
"A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth."
- Stendhal
(Related: Men, Woman, Youth)
"A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love."
- Stendhal
(Related: Love, Hope, Cause)
"A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness."
- Stendhal
(Related: Happiness, Woman)
"All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few."
- Stendhal
(Related: Fear, Cleverness)
"Far less envy in America than in France, and far less wit."
- Stendhal
(Related: America, Envy, France, Wit)
"Friendship has its illusions no less than love."
- Stendhal
(Related: Friendship, Love)
"God's only excuse is that he does not exist."
- Stendhal
(Related: God)