Stendhal quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Stendhal

Stendhal Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Stendhal on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Every true passion thinks only of itself.

But passion most dissembles, yet betrays, Even by its darkness; as the blackest sky Foretells the heaviest tempest. Don Juan, I. 73

Each man for himself in that desert of egoism which is called life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

An insane self-consciousness made him commit thousands of blunders.

Only great minds can afford a simple style.

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.

People happy in love have an air of intensity.

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.

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

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

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

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

It is something like love at first sight. An instant reveals to you what your heart had needed for a long time without recognizing it.

A novel is a mirror walking along a main road.

In Paris, love is born of fiction.

Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.

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

A novel is a mirror travelling down the road.

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

grotesque character of everyday occurrences conceals from one the real misery of passions. BARNAVE While

They can only touch the heart by bruising it.

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

Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.

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

I cannot provide the reality of events, I can only convey their shadow.

Feminine delicacy was carried to excess in Mme de Renal.

Friendship has its illusions no less than love.

Misery destroys judgment.

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

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.

sound reasoning always gives offence. Julien's

Alas! our frailty is the cause, not we! For such as we are made of, such we be. Twelfth Night It

Women prefer emotions to reasoning.

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

It seemed to Julian that there was far too much hair in his wig.

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

The only unhappiness is a life of boredom.

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

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.

His whole life had been merely a long preparation for misfortune,

Has he written to you?'
'He writes frequently.'
'Shew me his letters this instant, I order you'; and M. de Renal added six feet to his stature.

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

Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.

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

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

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

Prestige! Sir, is it nothing? To be revered by fools, gaped at by children, envied by the rich and scorned by the wise.

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

It was the destiny of Napoleon - would it one day be his?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion.

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

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

Beauty is nothing but a promise of happiness.

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

I see but one rule: to be clear.

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

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

I love her beauty, but I fear her mind.

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

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

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

On a cold winter morning a cigar fortifies the soul.

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

Love is like a fever which comes and goes quite independently of the will

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

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.

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

The only way of touching a heart is to wound it

Beauty is the promise of happiness.

Without patience, without absence of anger, no one can be called a politician.

Spring appears and we are once more children.

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.

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

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

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

I have a bad memory for facts.

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

Julien felt himself to be strong and resolute like a man who sees clearly into his own heart.