Stendhal Quotes

91 Sourced Quotes

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

Stendhal
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.

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

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

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

Stendhal
This mania of the mothers of the period, to be constantly in pursuit of a son-in-law.

Stendhal
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.

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

Stendhal
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.

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

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

Stendhal