Stendhal - The Red and the Black (1830)

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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
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.

Stendhal
I think being condemned to death is the only real distinction," said Mathilde. "It is the only thing which cannot be bought.

Stendhal
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.

Stendhal
Signs cannot be represented, in a spy's report, so damningly as words.

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
This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.

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
There is no such thing as "natural law": this expression is nothing but old nonsense... Prior to laws, what is natural is only the strength of the lion, or the need of the creature suffering from hunger or cold, in short, need.

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

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

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

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
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
A novel is a mirror that strolls along a highway. Now it reflects the blue of the skies, now the mud puddles underfoot.

Stendhal
Napoleon was indeed the man sent by God to help the youth of France! Who is to take his place?

Stendhal
Love born in the brain is more spirited, doubtless, than true love, but it has only flashes of enthusiasm; it knows itself too well, it criticizes itself incessantly; so far from banishing thought, it is itself reared only upon a structure of thought.

Stendhal
After moral poisoning, one requires physical remedies and a bottle of champagne.

Stendhal
The dinner was indifferent and the conversation irritating. "It's like the table of contents of a dull book," thought Julien. "All the greatest subjects of human thought are proudly displayed in it. Listen to it for three minutes, and you ask yourself which is more striking, the emphasis of the speaker or his shocking ignorance."

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

Stendhal