Stendhal Quotes

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Spring appears and we are once more children.

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

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

Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Women prefer emotions to reasoning.

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.

I love her beauty, but I fear her mind.

Beauty is nothing but a promise of happiness.

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

Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The only unhappiness is a life of boredom.