Quotes By Stendhal

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.

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.

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

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.

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.

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

People happy in love have an air of intensity.

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.

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.