Stendhal Quotes

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

Stendhal
One can acquire everything in solitude — except character.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stendhal