Stendhal's Quotes

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

To describe happiness is to diminish it.

What is really beautiful must always be true.

Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion.

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

God's only excuse is that he does not exist.

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.

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

Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.

Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.

Our true passions are selfish.

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.

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

She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?

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

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

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 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 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.

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

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

If you don't love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us.

Life is too short, and the time we waste in yawning never can be regained.