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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

It is better to have a prosaic husband and to take a romantic lover.

An English traveller relates how he lived upon intimate terms with a tiger; he had reared it and used to play with it, but always kept a loaded pistol on the table.

There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.

A melancholy air can never be the right thing; what you want is a bored air. If you are melancholy, it must be because you want something, there is something in which you have not succeeded. It is shewing your inferiority. If you are bored, on the other hand, it is the person who has tried in vain to please you who is inferior.

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

I call 'crystallization' that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events.

Napoleon was indeed the man sent by God to help the youth of France! Who is to take his place?

Signs cannot be represented, in a spy's report, so damningly as words.

Women prefer emotions to reasoning.

I see but one rule: to be clear. If I am not clear, all my world crumbles to nothing.

I no longer find such pleasure in that preeminently good society, of which I was once so fond. It seems to me that beneath a cloak of clever talk it proscribes all energy, all originality. If you are not a copy, people accuse you of being ill-mannered.

Every true passion thinks only of itself.

One-half, the finest half, of life is hidden from the man who does not love with passion.

It is not enough for a landscape to be interesting in itself. Eventually there must be a moral and historic interest.

Politics in the middle of things of the imagination is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert.

To seem sorrowful is not in good taste: You're supposed to seem bored.

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.

People are less self-conscious in the intimacy of family life and during the anxiety of a great sorrow. The dazzling varnish of anextreme politeness is then less in evidence, and the true qualities of the heart regain their proper proportions.

When you want to court a woman, court her sister first

There is no such thing as "natural law": this expression is nothing but old nonsense... Prior to laws, what is natural is only the strength of the lion, or the need of the creature suffering from hunger or cold; in short, need.

The first characteristic of Rossini's music is speed - a speed which removes from the soul all the sombre emotions that are so powerfully evoked within us by the slow strains in Mozart. I find also in Rossini a cool freshness, which, measure by measure, makes us smile with delight.

Spring appears and we are once more children.

Your career will be a painful one. I divine something in you which offends the vulgar.

I am mad, I am going under, I must follow the advice of a friend, and pay no heed to myself.

The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.

But, if I sample this pleasure so prudently and circumspectly, it will no longer be a pleasure.

The boredom of married life inevitable destroys love, when love has preceded marriage.

After moral poisoning, one requires physical remedies and a bottle of champagne.

Any man who talks about his love affairs thereby proves he is ignorant of love and is moved only by vanity.

I see but one rule: to be clear.

A man who is half an idiot, but who keeps a sharp lookout and acts prudently all his life, often enjoys the pleasure of triumphing over men of more imagination than he

Indeed, man has two different beings inside him. What devil thought of that malicious touch?

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.

On a cold winter morning a cigar fortifies the soul.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I have a bad memory for facts.

Beauty is nothing but a promise of happiness.

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

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

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.