Stendhal quotes

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

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

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.

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.

Women prefer emotions to reasoning.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

What is really beautiful must always be true.

Beauty is nothing but a promise of happiness.

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.

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.

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?

Only great minds can afford a simple style.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

To describe happiness is to diminish it.

Friendship has its illusions no less than love.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Our true passions are selfish.

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.

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

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.

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

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

Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.

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

The difference breeds hatred.

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.

I see but one rule: to be clear.

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 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.

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.

People happy in love have an air of intensity.

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

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

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

Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion.

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.

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

Every true passion thinks only of itself.

Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

A good book is an event in my life.

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

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

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

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.

Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.

I have a bad memory for facts.

I love her beauty, but I fear her mind.

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

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.

Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.

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

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

Spring appears and we are once more children.

The only unhappiness is a life of boredom.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

On a cold winter morning a cigar fortifies the soul.

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

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.

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

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

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