Stendhal Quotes
Perhaps men who cannot love passionately are those who feel the effect of beauty most keenly; at any rate this is the strongest impression women can make on them.
In matters of sentiment, the public has very crude ideas; and the most shocking fault of women is that they make the public the supreme judge of their lives.
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.
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 kept a loaded pistol on the table.
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 only our eyes looking in.
Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.
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.
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 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.
It is from cowardice and not from want of enlightenment that we do not read in our own hearts.
But, if I sample this pleasure so prudently and circumspectly, it will no longer be a pleasure.
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.
It is not enough for a landscape to be interesting in itself. Eventually there must be a moral and historic interest.
It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
War was then no longer this noble and unified outburst of souls in love with glory that he had imagined from Napoleon's proclamations.
The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.
Indeed, man has two different beings inside him. What devil thought of that malicious touch?
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 of America.
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 over men of more imagination than he
This religion takes away the courage of thinking of unusual things and prohibits self-examination above all as the most egregiousof sins.... It is one step away from protestantism.
When intimacy followed love in Italy there were no longer any vain pretensions between two lovers.
I call "crystallization" that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events.
I used to think of deathlike I suppose soldiers think of it: it was a possible thing that I could well avoid by my skill.
Every great action is extreme when it is undertaken. Only after it has been accomplished does it seem possible to those creatures of more common stuff.
