Because one has little fear of shocking vanity in Italy, people adopt an intimate tone very quickly and discuss personal things.
STENDHALThe Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.
More Stendhal Quotes
-
-
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.
STENDHAL -
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.
STENDHAL -
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 -
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.
STENDHAL -
When a man leaves his mistress, he runs the risk of being betrayed two or three times daily.
STENDHAL -
A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.
STENDHAL -
Women prefer emotions to reasoning.
STENDHAL -
Now that the steam engine rules the world, a title is an absurdity, still I am all dressed up in this title. It will crush me if Ido not support it. The title attracts attention to myself.
STENDHAL -
I am mad, I am going under, I must follow the advice of a friend, and pay no heed to myself.
STENDHAL -
In our calling, we have to choose; we must make our fortune either in this world or in the next, there is no middle way.
STENDHAL -
It is from cowardice and not from want of enlightenment that we do not read in our own hearts.
STENDHAL -
The difference breeds hatred.
STENDHAL -
Signs cannot be represented, in a spy’s report, so damningly as words.
STENDHAL -
The idea which tyrants find most useful is the idea of God.
STENDHAL -
Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.
STENDHAL -
There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.
STENDHAL -
I see but one rule: to be clear. If I am not clear, all my world crumbles to nothing.
STENDHAL -
When you want to court a woman, court her sister first
STENDHAL -
To describe happiness is to diminish it.
STENDHAL -
If you don’t love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us.
STENDHAL -
Beauty is nothing but a promise of happiness.
STENDHAL -
A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader’s soul.
STENDHAL -
It is difficult to escape from the prevailing disease of one’s generation.
STENDHAL -
People happy in love have an air of intensity.
STENDHAL -
Your career will be a painful one. I divine something in you which offends the vulgar.
STENDHAL -
It is not enough for a landscape to be interesting in itself. Eventually there must be a moral and historic interest.
STENDHAL