Stendhal Quotes

91 Sourced Quotes

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

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

One can acquire everything in solitude — except character.

Stendhal

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.

Stendhal

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.

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

I know of only one rule: style cannot be too clear, too simple.

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

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.

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

It is with blows dealt by public contempt that a husband kills his wife in the nineteenth century; it is by shutting the doors of all the drawing-rooms in her face.

Stendhal

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.

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

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. And besides, good society usurps its privileges. It had in the past the privilege of judging what was proper, but now that it supposes itself to be attacked, it condemns not what is irredeemably coarse and disagreeable, but what it thinks harmful to its interest.

Stendhal

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.

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

For those who have tasted the profound activity of writing, reading is no more than a secondary pleasure.

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

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.

Stendhal

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.

Stendhal

The only excuse for God is that He does not exist.

Stendhal

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.

Stendhal

Politics in the middle of things of the imagination is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert. The noise is loud without being forceful. It isn't in harmony with the sound of any instrument. This political discussion will mortally offend half my readers and bore the others, who have found a much more precise and vigorous account of such matters in their morning newspapers.

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

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.

Stendhal

Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

With the present system of education for girls any genius who happens to be born a woman can make no contribution to public happiness.

Stendhal