Stendhal Quotes

99 quotes in 963 categories

• Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.
• Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.
• 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…
• She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?
• The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.
• The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.
• A good book is an event in my life.
• I love her beauty, but I fear her mind.
• The tyranny of public opinion (and what an opinion!) is as fatuous in the small towns of France as it is in the United States…
• For the future, I shall rely only upon those elements of my character which I have tested. Who would ever have said that I should…
• The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or…
• Faith, I am no such fool; everyone for himself in this desert of selfishness which is called life.
• Love born in the brain is more spirited, doubtless, than true love, but it has only flashes of enthusiasm; it knows itself too well, it…
• Ah, Sir, a novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies, at another…
• I am mad, I am going under, I must follow the advice of a friend, and pay no heed to myself.
• An English traveller relates how he lived upon intimate terms with a tiger; he had reared it and used to play with it, but always…

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