Stendhal quotes:

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

People happy in love have an air of intensity.

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

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

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

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.

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

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

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.

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.

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

Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion.

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

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

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

I have a bad memory for facts.

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.

Only great minds can afford a simple style.

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

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

Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us.

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

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.

Could anything possibly be more humorous than believing in the depth or in the depravity of the Parisian character?"

Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.

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

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?

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

What is really beautiful must always be true.

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.

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.

Your water does not refresh me, said the thirsty genie. Yet it is the coolest well in all the Diar Bekir.

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

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

I will never demean myself to speak about my courage," said Julien, coldly, "it would be mean to do so. Let the world judge by the facts.

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

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.

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~?

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

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.

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

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

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

Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.

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

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

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.

Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.

On a cold winter morning a cigar fortifies the soul.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

To describe happiness is to diminish it.

Friendship has its illusions no less than love.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

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

Our true passions are selfish.

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

A good book is an event in my life.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Beauty is nothing but a promise of happiness.

Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Every true passion thinks only of itself.

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

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

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

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

I love her beauty, but I fear her mind.

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.

I see but one rule: to be clear.

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

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.

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.

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

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

In matters of sentiment, the public has very crude ideas; and the most shocking fault of women is that they make the public the supreme judge of their lives.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Love is like a fever which comes and goes quite independently of the will. ... there are no age limits for love.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Spring appears and we are once more children.

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

The difference breeds hatred.

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