Stendhal Quotes

99 quotes in 963 categories

• A woman of generous character will sacrifice her life a thousand times over for her lover, but will break with him for ever over a…
• Love is a well from which we can drink only as much as we have put in, and the stars that shine from it are…
• I see but one rule: to be clear.
• A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness.
• A man who is half an idiot, but who keeps a sharp lookout and acts prudently all his life, often enjoys the pleasure of triumphing…
• The first virtue of a young man today - that is, for the next fifty years perhaps, as long as we live in fear, and…
• A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader's soul.
• Love is like a fever which comes and goes quite independently of the will. ... there are no age limits for love.
• 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…
• There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.
• A very small matter, when all is said; only a fool would be concerned about it.
• A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.
• It is better to have a prosaic husband and to take a romantic lover.
• The English are, I think the most obtuse and barbarous people in the world
• Spring appears and we are once more children.
• To find love in Paris you must go down among those classes where the absence of education and of vanity, and the struggle for bare…
• Chélan had acted as imprudently for Julien as he had for himself. He had given him the habit of reasoning correctly, and of not being…
• I think being condemned to death is the only real distinction," said Mathilde. "It is the only thing which cannot be bought.
• Love has always been the most important business in my life, I should say the only one.
• The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

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