It is with blows dealt by public contempt that a husband kills his wife in the nineteenth century; it is by shutting the doors ofall the drawing-rooms in her face.
STENDHALYour career will be a painful one. I divine something in you which offends the vulgar.
More Stendhal Quotes
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It is from cowardice and not from want of enlightenment that we do not read in our own hearts.
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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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To seem sorrowful is not in good taste: You’re supposed to seem bored.
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The idea which tyrants find most useful is the idea of God.
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Far less envy in America than in France.
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After moral poisoning, one requires physical remedies and a bottle of champagne.
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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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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.
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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.
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People happy in love have an air of intensity.
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There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.
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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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But, if I sample this pleasure so prudently and circumspectly, it will no longer be a pleasure.
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It is difficult to escape from the prevailing disease of one’s generation.
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I call “crystallization” that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events.
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This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.
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Only great minds can afford a simple style.
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A good book is an event in my life.
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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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Beauty is nothing but a promise of happiness.
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Who knows whether it is not true that phosphorus and mind are not the same thing?
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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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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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Spring appears and we are once more children.
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The English are, I think the most obtuse and barbarous people in the world
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Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.
STENDHAL