Quotes By Stendhal

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.

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

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

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.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

To describe happiness is to diminish it.

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

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

Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.

Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.

If you think of paying court to the men in power, your eternal ruin is assured.

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

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.

People happy in love have an air of intensity.

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

Our true passions are selfish.

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

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

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.