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.
STENDHALIn 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.
More Stendhal Quotes
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A woman of generous character will sacrifice her life a thousand times over for her lover, but will break with him for ever over a question of pride.
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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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A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.
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A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.
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It is difficult to escape from the prevailing disease of one’s generation.
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I used to think of deathlike I suppose soldiers think of it: it was a possible thing that I could well avoid by my skill.
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It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
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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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Friendship has its illusions no less than love.
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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.
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Power, after love, is the first source of happiness.
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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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A good book is an event in my life.
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Indeed, man has two different beings inside him. What devil thought of that malicious touch?
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Any man who talks about his love affairs thereby proves he is ignorant of love and is moved only by vanity.
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