Stendhal Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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

To describe happiness is to diminish it.

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

Friendship has its illusions no less than love.

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

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

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

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.

Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion.

Our true passions are selfish.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

People happy in love have an air of intensity.

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.

On a cold winter morning a cigar fortifies the soul.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.

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.

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

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

Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.

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.

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

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.

Far less envy in America than in France.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.