Quotes by
Stendhal |
1783-1842 , French writer
Pen name of Marie-Henri Beyle. He took part in the French administration and in the Napoleonic wars, travelled extensively in Germany and was part of Napoleon’s army in the 1812 invasion of Russia. He lived for many years in Italy and was French consul at Trieste and Civitavecchia.As a writer is best known for the novels Le Rouge et le noir (1830 – The Red and the Black) and La Chartreuse de Parme (1839 – The Charterhouse of Parma).
He was not fully appreciated until the beginning of the 20th century.
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Quotations
| • | One can acquire everything by solitude, except character. 3 |
| • | Russians imitate French ways, but always from a distance of fifty years. 2 |
| • | One must give the conquest of a woman the attention one gives to a game of billiards. 1 |
| • | All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the intelligence of the few. 1 |
| • | Pleasure is often destroyed when we try to describe it. 1 |
| • | The most useful idea for tyrants is the idea of God. |
| • | The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same. |
| • | Life is very short, and it ought not to be spent crawling at the feet of miserable scoundrels. |
| • | Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us. |
| • | Women prefer feelings over logic. |
| • | When you want to court a woman, court her sister first. |
| • | Love is like fever; it comes and goes without the will having any part of the process. |
| • | The boredom of married life inevitable destroys love, when love has preceded marriage. |
| • | If you don’t love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us. |
| • | The more one pleases everybody, the less one pleases profoundly. |
| • | I do not feel I have wisdom enough yet to love what is ugly. |
| • | The only unhappiness is a life of boredom. |
| • | What is really beautiful must always be true. |
| • | Our true passions are selfish. |
| • | People happy in love have an air of intensity. |
| • | A good book is an event in my life. |
| • | Faith, I am no such fool; everyone for himself in this desert of selfishness which is called life. |
| • | One-half, the finest half, of life is hidden from the man who does not love with passion. |
| • | 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. |
| • | I call “crystallization” that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events. |
| • | The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth. |
| • | I used to think of death like I suppose soldiers think of it: it was a possible thing that I could well avoid by my skill. |
| • | There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness. |
| • | I love her beauty, but I fear her mind. |
| • | The only way of touching a heart is to wound it. |
| • | It's not so much being rich that brings happiness, it's becoming rich. |
| • | Old age is nothing but the absence of craziness, the loss of illusion and passion. |
| • | Beauty is a promise of happiness. |
| • | Whatever diplomats and poets may say, the most important trait of language is clarity. |
| • | Tears are an extreme smile. |
| • | God's only excuse is that He doesn't exist. |
| • | Luck grabs you by the hair, but she herself is bald. |
| • | There is much less envy in America than in France. And much less spirit. |
| • | A woman in her forties has value only to the men who loved her in her youth. |
| • | Power, after love, is the first source of happiness. |
| • | A strange thing: The Enlightenment period in Italy ended when petty bloodthirsty tyrants were replaced by moderate monarchs. |
| • | Prudery is a form of avarice, the worst of all. |
| • | The essential quality of a historian is not to be able to invent. |
| • | Style is everyone’s unique way of expressing the same thing. |
