I see but one rule: to be clear.
STENDHALWhen a man leaves his mistress, he runs the risk of being betrayed two or three times daily.
More Stendhal Quotes
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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.
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It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
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Power, after love, is the first source of happiness.
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A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader’s soul.
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Love is like fever; it comes and goes without the will having any part of the process.
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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.
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War was then no longer this noble and unified outburst of souls in love with glory that he had imagined from Napoleon’s proclamations.
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When a man leaves his mistress, he runs the risk of being betrayed two or three times daily.
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I have a bad memory for facts.
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Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.
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But, if I sample this pleasure so prudently and circumspectly, it will no longer be a pleasure.
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Life is too short, and the time we waste in yawning never can be regained.
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To describe happiness is to diminish it.
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If you want to be witty, work on your character and say what you think on every occasion.
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One-half, the finest half, of life is hidden from the man who does not love with passion.
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There is no such thing as “natural law”: this expression is nothing but old nonsense… Prior to laws, what is natural is only the strength of the lion, or the need of the creature suffering from hunger or cold, in short, need.
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Women prefer emotions to reasoning.
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A woman of generous character will sacrifice her life a thousand times over for her lover, but will break with him for ever over a question of pride.
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Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.
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Spring appears and we are once more children.
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Our true passions are selfish.
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The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.
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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.
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When you want to court a woman, court her sister first
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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.
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I am mad, I am going under, I must follow the advice of a friend, and pay no heed to myself.
STENDHAL