Stendhal Quotes

91 Sourced Quotes

One can acquire everything in solitude — except character.

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

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

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
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.

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

Stendhal
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.

Stendhal
What is really beautiful must always be true.

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

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

Stendhal
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.

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

Stendhal
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.

Stendhal
Wit lasts no more than two centuries.

Stendhal
At La Scala it is customary to take no more than twenty minutes for those little visits one pays to boxes.

Stendhal
A novel is a mirror that strolls along a highway. Now it reflects the blue of the skies, now the mud puddles underfoot.

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

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

Stendhal
This religion takes away the courage of thinking of unusual things and prohibits self-examination above all as the most egregious of sins. It is one step away from protestantism.

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

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

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

Stendhal