Stendhal Quotes (50 Quotes)

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

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.

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

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

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

Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion.

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

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

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

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

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

Friendship has its illusions no less than love.

To describe happiness is to diminish it.

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.

In the choice of a lover a woman places more importance on how other women view him than on how she herself sees him.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

People happy in love have an air of intensity.

Our true passions are selfish.

Politics in the middle of things that concern the imagination are like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, ... Le Rouge et le noir.

Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.

Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.

Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.

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.

A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road.

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

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.

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

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

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

Only great minds can afford a simple style.

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

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.

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

Far less envy in America than in France, and far less wit.

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

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

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

What is really beautiful must always be true.

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

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

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