Stendhal Quotes

#1. Love is like fever; it comes and goes without the will having any part of the process.

Stendhal

#2. Has he written to you?'
'He writes frequently.'
'Shew me his letters this instant, I order you'; and M. de Renal added six feet to his stature.

Stendhal

#3. Oh, if there were only a true religion. Fool that I am, I see a Gothic cathedral and venerable stained-glass windows, and my weak heart conjures up the priest to fit the scene. My soul would understand him, my soul has need of him. I only find a nincompoop with dirty hair.

Stendhal

#4. Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all.

Stendhal

#5. 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.

Stendhal

#6. Alas! our frailty is the cause, not we! For such as we are made of, such we be. Twelfth Night It

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

#8. 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

#9. The suspicion that a rival is loved is painful enough already, but to have the love that he inspires in her confessed to one in detail by the woman whom one adores is without doubt the acme of suffering.

Stendhal

#10. It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

#12. Prestige! Sir, is it nothing? To be revered by fools, gaped at by children, envied by the rich and scorned by the wise.

Stendhal

#13. The more one pleases everybody, the less one pleases profoundly.

Stendhal

#14. People happy in love have an air of intensity.

Stendhal

#15. 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.

Stendhal

#16. The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.

Stendhal

#17. To describe happiness is to diminish it.

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

#19. Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.

Stendhal

#20. It is with blows dealt by public contempt that a husband kills his wife in the nineteenth century; it is by shutting the doors ofall the drawing-rooms in her face.

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

#22. Love of the head has doubtless more intelligence than true love, but it only has moments of enthusiasm. It knows itself too well, it sits in judgement on itself incessantly; far from distracting thought, it is made by sheer force of thought.

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

#24. A novel is a mirror travelling down the road.

Stendhal

#25. The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.

Stendhal

#26. A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Stendhal

#27. 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.

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

#29. 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.

Stendhal

#30. The only unhappiness is a life of boredom.

Stendhal

#31. sound reasoning always gives offence. Julien's

Stendhal

#32. Beauty is the promise of happiness.

Stendhal

#33. 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

#34. What is really beautiful must always be true.

Stendhal

#35. But passion most dissembles, yet betrays, Even by its darkness; as the blackest sky Foretells the heaviest tempest. Don Juan, I. 73

Stendhal

#36. I love her beauty, but I fear her mind.

Stendhal

#37. The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.

Stendhal

#38. 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

#39. To be loved at first sight, a man should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in his face.

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

#42. In Paris, love is born of fiction.

Stendhal

#43. Love is a beautiful flower, but we must be brave enough to pick her up from the edge of a precipice.

Stendhal

#44. Your water does not refresh me, said the thirsty genie. Yet it is the coolest well in all the Diar Bekir.

Stendhal

#45. Our true passions are selfish.

Stendhal

#46. I see but one rule: to be clear.

Stendhal

#47. 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

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

Stendhal

#49. 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

#50. 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.

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

#52. Exalted by a sentiment of which she was proud, and that overcame all her arrogance, she was reluctant to let a moment of her life go by without occupying it with some remarkable deed.

Stendhal

#53. 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.

Stendhal

#54. It seemed to Julian that there was far too much hair in his wig.

Stendhal

#55. 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?

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

#58. 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.

Stendhal

#59. Love is like a fever which comes and goes quite independently of the will

Stendhal

#60. The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears.

Stendhal

#61. On a cold winter morning a cigar fortifies the soul.

Stendhal

#62. 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

Stendhal

#63. Each man for himself in that desert of egoism which is called life.

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

#65. A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.

Stendhal

#66. His whole life had been merely a long preparation for misfortune,

Stendhal

#67. When you want to court a woman, court her sister first

Stendhal

#68. A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness.

Stendhal

#69. Feminine delicacy was carried to excess in Mme de Renal.

Stendhal

#70. The idea of most use to tyrants is that of God,

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

#73. Courage was the fundamental quality in her character. Nothing was capable of giving her any excitement and of curing her of an ever-present tendency to boredom, but the idea that she was playing heads or tails with her whole existence.

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

#75. A novel is a mirror walking along a main road.

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

#77. To write a book is to risk being shot at in public.

Stendhal

#78. I used to think of deathlike I suppose soldiers think of it: it was a possible thing that I could well avoid by my skill.

Stendhal

#79. Now that the steam engine rules the world, a title is an absurdity, still I am all dressed up in this title. It will crush me if Ido not support it. The title attracts attention to myself.

Stendhal

#80. A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

#82. Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.

Stendhal

#83. Far less envy in America than in France, and far less wit.

Stendhal

#84. They can only touch the heart by bruising it.

Stendhal

#85. Could anything possibly be more humorous than believing in the depth or in the depravity of the Parisian character?

Stendhal

#86. Julien felt himself to be strong and resolute like a man who sees clearly into his own heart.

Stendhal

#87. The only way of touching a heart is to wound it

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

#89. An insane self-consciousness made him commit thousands of blunders.

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

#91. Wounded pride can take a rich young man far who is surrounded by flatterers since birth.

Stendhal

#92. Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion.

Stendhal

#93. 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

#94. Am I capable of deceiving my friend? Julien asked himself peevishly. This being, for whom hypocrisy and an absence of all sympathy were the usual methods of protecting himself, could not bear, this time, the thought of the slightest trickiness in dealing with a man for whom he had friendly feelings.

Stendhal

#95. A girl of sixteen had a complexion like a rose, and she put on rouge.

Stendhal

#96. 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

#97. Here are my politics: I love music and painting; a good book is an event for me; I'm going on forty-four. How much time do I have left? Fifteen, twenty, thirty years at most? Very well! I maintain that in thirty years ministers will be a bit shrewder, but just about as honest as they are today.

Stendhal

#98. One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

Stendhal

#99. Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us.

Stendhal

#100. 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