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.
STENDHALWounded pride can take a rich young man far who is surrounded by flatterers since birth.
More Stendhal Quotes
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The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
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Power, after love, is the first source of happiness.
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The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.
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The sight of anything extremely beautiful, in nature or in art, brings back the memory of what one loves, with the speed of lightning.
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If you think of paying court to the men in power, your eternal ruin is assured.
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Signs cannot be represented, in a spy’s report, so damningly as words.
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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.
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Indeed, man has two different beings inside him. What devil thought of that malicious touch?
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Love is like a fever which comes and goes quite independently of the will. There are no age limits for love.
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A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road.
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Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.
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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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Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.
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Faith, I am no such fool; everyone for himself in this desert of selfishness which is called life.
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The first virtue of a young man today – that is, for the next fifty years perhaps, as long as we live in fear, and religion has regained its powers – is to be incapable of enthusiasm and not to have much in the way of brains.
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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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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.
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The English are, I think the most obtuse and barbarous people in the world
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The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears.
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The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.
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I do not feel I have wisdom enough yet to love what is ugly.
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She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?
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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.
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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.
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God’s only excuse is that he does not exist.
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Politics in the middle of things of the imagination is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert.
STENDHAL