Quotes By Stendhal

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

What is really beautiful must always be true.

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

If you think of paying court to the men in power, your eternal ruin is assured.

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.

The more one pleases everybody, the less one pleases profoundly.

It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.

Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.

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.

All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.

If you don't love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us.

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

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.

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.

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

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

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

Friendship has its illusions no less than love.

God's only excuse is that he does not exist.

Life is too short, and the time we waste in yawning never can be regained.

Far less envy in America than in France, and far less wit.

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.

A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of 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 high water.

Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion.

Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.

Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.

Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.

The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.