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.
STENDHALPerhaps 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.
More Stendhal Quotes
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The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears.
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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.
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Wounded pride can take a rich young man far who is surrounded by flatterers since birth.
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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.
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I see but one rule: to be clear. If I am not clear, all my world crumbles to nothing.
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The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
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Because one has little fear of shocking vanity in Italy, people adopt an intimate tone very quickly and discuss personal things.
STENDHAL -
Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.
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Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.
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It is not enough for a landscape to be interesting in itself. Eventually there must be a moral and historic interest.
STENDHAL -
I see but one rule: to be clear.
STENDHAL -
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.
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Politics in the middle of things of the imagination is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert.
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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.
STENDHAL -
A good book is an event in my life.
STENDHAL






