Top 135 Quotes & Sayings by Stendhal - Page 2

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.

Love is like a fever which comes and goes quite independently of the will. ... there are no age limits for love.

A man who is half an idiot, but who keeps a sharp lookout and acts prudently all his life, often enjoys the pleasure of triumphing over men of more imagination than he

The sight of anything extremely beautiful, in nature or in art, brings back the memory of what one loves, with the speed of lightning.

Faith, I am no such fool; everyone for himself in this desert of selfishness which is called life.

It is difficult to escape from the prevailing disease of one's generation.

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

A very small matter, when all is said; only a fool would be concerned about it.

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.

Perhaps men who cannot love passionately are those who feel the effect of beauty most keenly; at any rate this is the strongest impression women can make on them.

...one of the traits of genius is not to drag its thought through the rut worn by vulgar minds.

If you want to be witty, work on your character and say what you think on every occasion.

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.

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

Conversationis like the table of contents of a dull book.... All the greatest subjects of human thought are proudly displayedin it. Listen to it for three minutes, and you ask yourself which is more striking, the emphasis of the speaker or his shocking ignorance.

A melancholy air can never be the right thing; what you want is a bored air. If you are melancholy, it must be because you want something, there is something in which you have not succeeded. It is shewing your inferiority. If you are bored, on the other hand, it is the person who has tried in vain to please you who is inferior.

It is not enough for a landscape to be interesting in itself. Eventually there must be a moral and historic interest.

There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

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.

I no longer find such pleasure in that preeminently good society, of which I was once so fond. It seems to me that beneath a cloak of clever talk it proscribes all energy, all originality. If you are not a copy, people accuse you of being ill-mannered.

A good book is an event in my life.

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

Every true passion thinks only of itself.

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

But, if I sample this pleasure so prudently and circumspectly, it will no longer be a pleasure.

Spring appears and we are once more children.

I have a bad memory for facts.

It is from cowardice and not from want of enlightenment that we do not read in our own hearts.

The boredom of married life inevitable destroys love, when love has preceded marriage.

In matters of sentiment, the public has very crude ideas; and the most shocking fault of women is that they make the public the supreme judge of their lives.

This religion takes away the courage of thinking of unusual things and prohibits self-examination above all as the most egregiousof sins.... It is one step away from protestantism.

Every great action is extreme when it is undertaken. Only after it has been accomplished does it seem possible to those creatures of more common stuff.

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.

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.

The first characteristic of Rossini's music is speed - a speed which removes from the soul all the sombre emotions that are so powerfully evoked within us by the slow strains in Mozart. I find also in Rossini a cool freshness, which, measure by measure, makes us smile with delight.

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

Sometimes the impact of Mozart's music is so immediate that the vision in the mind remains blurred and incomplete, while the soul seems to be directly invaded, drenched in wave upon wave of melancholy.

The difference breeds hatred.

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.

One-half, the finest half, of life is hidden from the man who does not love with passion.

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

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

Beauty is nothing but a promise of happiness.

Who knows whether it is not true that phosphorus and mind are not the same thing?

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

For the future, I shall rely only upon those elements of my character which I have tested. Who would ever have said that I should find pleasure in shedding tears? That I should love the man who proves to me that I am nothing more than a fool?

Jean Jacques Rousseauis nothing but a fool in my eyes when he takes it upon himself to criticise society; he did not understand it, and approached it with the heart of an upstart flunkey.... For all his preaching a Republic and the overthrow of monarchical titles, the upstart is mad with joy if a Duke alters the course of his after-dinner stroll to accompany one of his friends.

When intimacy followed love in Italy there were no longer any vain pretensions between two lovers.

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

On a cold winter morning a cigar fortifies the soul.

Your career will be a painful one. I divine something in you which offends the vulgar.

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

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

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

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.

To seem sorrowful is not in good taste: You're supposed to seem bored.

Why not make an end of it all?... My life is a succession of griefs and bitter feelings.... What is death?... A very small matter,when all is said; only a fool would be concerned about it.

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 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.

I call "crystallization" that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events.