Stendhal Quotes

91 Sourced Quotes

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
The pleasures and the cares of the luckiest ambition, even of limitless power, are nothing next to the intimate happiness that tenderness and love give. I am a man before being a prince, and when I have the good fortune to be in love my mistress addresses a man and not a prince.

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

Stendhal
Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.

Stendhal
To be loved at first sight, a man should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in his face.

Stendhal
The count had reached his fifties: a cruel word whose resonance can perhaps be fully appreciated only by a man desperately in love.

Stendhal
I see but one rule: to be clear. If I am not clear, all my world crumbles to nothing.

Stendhal
The nervous fluid in man is consumed by the brain; in woman, by the heart: it is there that they are the most sensitive.

Stendhal
Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us. To know men thoroughly, to judge events sanely, is, therefore, a great step towards happiness.

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

Stendhal
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.

Stendhal