Quotes By Stendhal

Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.

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

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.

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

Only great minds can afford a simple style.

Power, after love, is the first source of happiness.

Friendship has its illusions no less than love.

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.

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

What is really beautiful must always be true.

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

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

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

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.

Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion.

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

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.

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

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

All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.

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.

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.

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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