Stendhal - The Charterhouse of Parma (1839)

12 Sourced Quotes

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

Stendhal
The taste for freedom, the fashion and cult of happiness of the majority that the nineteenth century is infatuated with, was only a heresy in his eyes that would pass like others.

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

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

Stendhal
Because one has little fear of shocking vanity in Italy, people adopt an intimate tone very quickly and discuss personal things.

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

Stendhal
War was then no longer this noble and unified outburst of souls in love with glory that he had imagined from Napoleon's proclamations.

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