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Stendhal Quotes


Only great minds can afford a simple style.

Our true passions are selfish.

People happy in love have an air of intensity.

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.

Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.

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.

Power, after love, is the first source of happiness.

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

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

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 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 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 more one pleases everybody, the less one pleases profoundly.

The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears.

The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.

The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.

This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.

To be loved at first sight, a man should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in his face.