Stendhal Quotes

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.

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.

Only great minds can afford a simple style.

I have a bad memory for facts.

Every true passion thinks only of itself.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

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

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.

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

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.

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.

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

What is really beautiful must always be true.

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.

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

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

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

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

The difference breeds hatred.

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

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

I see but one rule: to be clear.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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