Stendhal Quotes

91 Sourced Quotes

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

Stendhal
Courtiers of all ages feel one great need: to speak in such a way that they do not say anything.

Stendhal
The only passion that has outlived all the rest is love of money.

Stendhal
A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader's soul.

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

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
Since I am a man, my heart is three or four times less sensitive, because I have three or four times as much power of reason and experience of the world — a thing which you women call hard-heartedness.
As a man, I can take refuge in having mistresses. The more of them I have, and the greater the scandal, the more I acquire reputation and brilliance in society.

Stendhal
It is better to have a prosaic husband and to take a romantic lover.

Stendhal
She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?

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
An English traveller relates how he lived upon intimate terms with a tiger; he had reared it and used to play with it, but always kept a loaded pistol on the table.

Stendhal
In love, unlike most other passions, the recollection of what you have had and lost is always better than what you can hope for in the future.

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
The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.

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

Stendhal
Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.

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
Were I to buy this life of pleasure and this only chance at happiness with a few little dangers, where would be the harm? And wouldn't it still be fortunate to find a weak excuse to give her proof of my love?

Stendhal
In our calling, we have to choose; we must make our fortune either in this world or in the next, there is no middle way.

Stendhal
Woman is a delightful musical instrument, of which love is the bow, and man the artist.

Stendhal
I used to love mathematics for its own sake, and I still do, because it allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness, my two bêtes noires.

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

Stendhal
Love has always been the most important business in my life; I should say the only one.

Stendhal
What is really beautiful must always be true.

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
Why does he not know how to select servants? The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.

Stendhal
I am mad, I am going under, I must follow the advice of a friend, and pay no heed to myself.

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