Top 100 Quotes About Stendhal
#1. According to Stendhal it takes about a year and a month to fall in love, all being well.
Helen Oyeyemi
#2. I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I've fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody's going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I'm crazy or I keep getting better.
Ernest Hemingway,
#3. It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one to have his passion as a profession.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#4. Stendhal had said a Frenchman was an Italian in a bad mood.
Edmund White
#5. Perhaps I am even envious of Stendhal? He robbed me of the best atheist joke which precisely I could have made: 'God's only excuse is that he does not exist' ... I myself have said somewhere: what hitherto been the greatest objection to existence? God ...
Friedrich Nietzsche
#6. Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know all about Stendhal's or Faulkner's.
Milan Kundera
#7. Stendhal wrote that music was the highest form of art and that all the other forms really wanted to be music. This was of course a Platonic idea, all the other art forms depict something else, music is the only one that is something in itself, it was absolutely incomparable.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#8. I would give a hundred Hemingways for one Stendhal or one Benjamin Constant. And I regret the influence of this literature on many young writers.
(1945)
Albert Camus
#9. One of the odd things about Stendhal is that though he was always on the watch lest anyone made a fool of him, he was constantly making a fool of himself.
W. Somerset Maugham
#10. I've read Proust and Stendhal. That keeps you in your place.
Francoise Sagan
#11. 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.
Stendhal
#12. Love is like fever; it comes and goes without the will having any part of the process.
Stendhal
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. grotesque character of everyday occurrences conceals from one the real misery of passions. BARNAVE While
Stendhal
#16. I cannot provide the reality of events, I can only convey their shadow.
Stendhal
#17. Friendship has its illusions no less than love.
Stendhal
#19. Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all.
Stendhal
#20. 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
#21. Alas! our frailty is the cause, not we! For such as we are made of, such we be. Twelfth Night It
Stendhal
#22. To seem sorrowful is not in good taste: You're supposed to seem bored.
Stendhal
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
Stendhal
#26. The idea which tyrants find most useful is the idea of God.
Stendhal
#27. Indeed, man has two different beings inside him. What devil thought of that malicious touch?
Stendhal
#28. 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
#29. Prestige! Sir, is it nothing? To be revered by fools, gaped at by children, envied by the rich and scorned by the wise.
Stendhal
#30. The more one pleases everybody, the less one pleases profoundly.
Stendhal
#31. People happy in love have an air of intensity.
Stendhal
#32. Without patience, without absence of anger, no one can be called a politician.
Stendhal
#33. 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
#34. The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.
Stendhal
#35. To describe happiness is to diminish it.
Stendhal
#36. She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?
Stendhal
#37. Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.
Stendhal
#38. I am mad, I am going under, I must follow the advice of a friend, and pay no heed to myself.
Stendhal
#39. 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.
Stendhal
#40. 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.
Stendhal
#41. Every true passion thinks only of itself.
Stendhal
#42. Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.
Stendhal
#43. 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
#44. Because one has little fear of shocking vanity in Italy, people adopt an intimate tone very quickly and discuss personal things.
Stendhal
#45. 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
#46. All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.
Stendhal
#47. A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader's soul.
Stendhal
#48. I will never demean myself to speak about my courage," said Julien, coldly, "it would be mean to do so. Let the world judge by the facts.
Stendhal
#49. 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.
Stendhal
#50. A novel is a mirror travelling down the road.
Stendhal
#51. I think being condemned to death is the only real distinction," said Mathilde. "It is the only thing which cannot be bought.
Stendhal
#52. The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.
Stendhal
#53. A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.
Stendhal
#54. 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
#55. Women prefer emotions to reasoning.
Stendhal
#56. At a distance, we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight.
Stendhal
#57. 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
#58. If you think of paying court to the men in power, your eternal ruin is assured.
Stendhal
#59. I call 'crystallization' that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events.
Stendhal
#60. The only unhappiness is a life of boredom.
Stendhal
#61. sound reasoning always gives offence. Julien's
Stendhal
#62. Beauty is the promise of happiness.
Stendhal
#63. 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.
Stendhal
#64. 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
#66. Want of exercise was beginning to affect his health and to give him the weak and excitable character of a young German student.
Stendhal
#67. What is really beautiful must always be true.
Stendhal
#68. But passion most dissembles, yet betrays, Even by its darkness; as the blackest sky Foretells the heaviest tempest. Don Juan, I. 73
Stendhal
#69. I love her beauty, but I fear her mind.
Stendhal
#70. The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.
Stendhal
#71. Who knows whether it is not true that phosphorus and mind are not the same thing?
Stendhal
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. It is better to have a prosaic husband and to take a romantic lover.
Stendhal
#75. 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
#76. In Paris, love is born of fiction.
Stendhal
#77. Love is a beautiful flower, but we must be brave enough to pick her up from the edge of a precipice.
Stendhal
#78. Spring appears and we are once more children.
Stendhal
#79. Your water does not refresh me, said the thirsty genie. Yet it is the coolest well in all the Diar Bekir.
Stendhal
#80. Our true passions are selfish.
Stendhal
#81. I see but one rule: to be clear.
Stendhal
#82. 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
#83. When a man leaves his mistress, he runs the risk of being betrayed two or three times daily.
Stendhal
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. Leave me with my life of the imagination. Your petty pestering, your details of real life, which all upset me to some degree, would drag me down from heaven. Each person dies as best he may; my wish is not to think of death except in my own way.
Stendhal
#87. Any man who talks about his love affairs thereby proves he is ignorant of love and is moved only by vanity.
Stendhal
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. It seemed to Julian that there was far too much hair in his wig.
Stendhal
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. On the other hand in America, in the Republic, one has to spend the whole weary day paying serious court to the shopkeepers in the street, and must become as stupid as they are; and there, one has no Opera.
Stendhal
#94. One-half, the finest half, of life is hidden from the man who does not love with passion.
Stendhal
#95. It is from cowardice and not from want of enlightenment that we do not read in our own hearts.
Stendhal
#96. Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.
Stendhal
#97. This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.
Stendhal
#98. There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.
Stendhal
#99. A good book is an event in my life.
Stendhal
#100. 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
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