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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
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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.
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It is from cowardice and not from want of enlightenment that we do not read in our own hearts.
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Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.
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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.
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It is not enough for a landscape to be interesting in itself. Eventually there must be a moral and historic interest.
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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.
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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.
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I think being condemned to death is the only real distinction," said Mathilde. "It is the only thing which cannot be bought.
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It is difficult to escape from the prevailing disease of one's generation.
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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.
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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.
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Because one has little fear of shocking vanity in Italy, people adopt an intimate tone very quickly and discuss personal things.
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Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all.
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To be loved at first sight, a man should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in his face.
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Signs cannot be represented, in a spy's report, so damningly as words.
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War was then no longer this noble and unified outburst of souls in love with glory that he had imagined from Napoleon's proclamations.
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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.
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The nervous fluid in man is consumed by the brain; in woman, by the heart: it is there that they are the most sensitive.
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This mania of the mothers of the period, to be constantly in pursuit of a son-in-law.
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It would be impossible for a woman to be more wretched …I hope I am going to die…I feel my heart freezing.
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This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.
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I see but one rule: to be clear. If I am not clear, all my world crumbles to nothing.
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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 I do not support it. The title attracts attention to myself.
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Napoleon was indeed the man sent by God to help the youth of France! Who is to take his place?
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Stendhal
Creative Commons
Born:
January 23, 1783
Died:
March 23, 1842
(aged 59)
Bio:
Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his pen name Stendhal, was a 19th-century French writer.
Known for:
The Red and the Black (1830)
The Charterhouse of Parma (1839)
Armance (1827)
Lucien Leuwen
Vanina Vanini (1829)
Most used words:
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man
woman
happiness
thought
life
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women
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pleasure
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Stendhal on Wikipedia
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