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I see but one rule: to be clear.

Stendhal

Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.
STENDHAL

Description Happiness Spoil
Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all.
STENDHAL

Kind Vice Worst
Far less envy in America than in France.
STENDHAL

Feeling Jealous Place
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.
STENDHAL

Comparison Death Love Pay Standard Thinking True
The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.
STENDHAL

Distance Imitation Time
Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.
STENDHAL

Fashion Hide
One-half, the finest half, of life is hidden from the man who does not love with passion.
STENDHAL

Fine Hide Love Man Passion
To seem sorrowful is not in good taste: You’re supposed to seem bored.
STENDHAL

Bored Goodness Sorrow Taste
At a distance, we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight.
STENDHAL

Authority Distance Sight Subject
Indeed, man has two different beings inside him. What devil thought of that malicious touch?
STENDHAL

Devil Different Man Touch
Wounded pride can take a rich young man far who is surrounded by flatterers since birth.
STENDHAL

Birth Man Pride Rich Surround Wound Young
Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion.
STENDHAL

Emotion Search Woman
The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.
STENDHAL

Ability History Invention Qualification
It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
STENDHAL

Noble Past Reading Style Time Writing
Life is very short, and it ought not to be spent crawling at the feet of miserable scoundrels.
STENDHAL

Life Misery Short Time
War was then no longer this noble and unified outburst of souls in love with glory that he had imagined from Napoleon’s proclamations.
STENDHAL

Glory Himself Imagination Noble War

I see but one rule: to be clear.

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I see but one rule: to be clear.

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