Top 135 Quotes & Sayings by Stendhal
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French writer Stendhal.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.
All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.
The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.
To describe happiness is to diminish it.
Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore.
A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness.
If you don't love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us.
The man of genius is he and he alone who finds such joy in his art that he will work at it come hell or high water.
The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.
Life is too short, and the time we waste in yawning never can be regained.
Far less envy in America than in France, and far less wit.
God's only excuse is that he does not exist.
Power, after love, is the first source of happiness.
It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
If you think of paying court to the men in power, your eternal ruin is assured.
Love has always been the most important business in my life, I should say the only one.
Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.
Our true passions are selfish.
She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?
This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.
The more one pleases everybody, the less one pleases profoundly.
A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.
A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.
To be loved at first sight, a man should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in his face.
What is really beautiful must always be true.
I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.
Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.
Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all.
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.
The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears.
One can acquire everything in solitude except character.
True love makes the thought of death frequent, easy, without terrors; it merely becomes the standard of comparison, the price one would pay for many things.
People happy in love have an air of intensity.
Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.
Friendship has its illusions no less than love.
A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.
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.
The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.
Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion.
Only great minds can afford a simple style.
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.
The more a race is governed by its passions, the less it has acquired the habit of cautious and reasoned argument, the more intense will be its love of music.
The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.
Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.
Women prefer emotions to reasoning.
The English are, I think the most obtuse and barbarous people in the world
Love is like fever; it comes and goes without the will having any part of the process.
The only unhappiness is a life of boredom.
The tyranny of public opinion (and what an opinion!) is as fatuous in the small towns of France as it is in the United States of America.
I love her beauty, but I fear her mind.
A woman of generous character will sacrifice her life a thousand times over for her lover, but will break with him for ever over a question of pride.
A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader's soul.
Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.
I do not feel I have wisdom enough yet to love what is ugly.
Love is a well from which we can drink only as much as we have put in, and the stars that shine from it are only our eyes looking in.
Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us.
The idea which tyrants find most useful is the idea of God.
I see but one rule: to be clear.
Life is very short, and it ought not to be spent crawling at the feet of miserable scoundrels.
When you want to court a woman, court her sister first
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