Quotes by Stendhal

• Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.
• 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.
• Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.
• 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.
• People happy in love have an air of intensity.
• Our true passions are selfish.
• Only great minds can afford a simple style.
• 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.
• She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?
• Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.
• Love has always been the most important business in my life, I should say the only one.
• Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.
• It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
• If you think of paying court to the men in power, your eternal ruin is assured.
• One can acquire everything in solitude except character.
• The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears.
• Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion.
• What is really beautiful must always be true.
• 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.
• To describe happiness is to diminish it.
• To be loved at first sight, a man should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in his face.
• This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.
• Power, after love, is the first source of happiness.
• The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.
• Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all.
• The more one pleases everybody, the less one pleases profoundly.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.
• The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.
• 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.
• 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.
• Life is too short, and the time we waste in yawning never can be regained.
• 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.
• A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.
• A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.
• 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.
• Far less envy in America than in France, and far less wit.
• Friendship has its illusions no less than love.
• God's only excuse is that he does not exist.