All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.
STENDHALWhy not make an end of it all? My life is a succession of griefs and bitter feelings. What is death? A very small matter, when all is said; only a fool would be concerned about it.
More Stendhal Quotes
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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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If you don’t love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us.
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To seem sorrowful is not in good taste: You’re supposed to seem bored.
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Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion.
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The English are, I think the most obtuse and barbarous people in the world
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Only great minds can afford a simple style.
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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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I see but one rule: to be clear. If I am not clear, all my world crumbles to nothing.
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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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Great ladies are no more spiteful than the average rich woman; but one acquires in their society a greater susceptibility, and feels more profoundly andmore irremediably, their unpleasant remarks.
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Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.
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Signs cannot be represented, in a spy’s report, so damningly as words.
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This religion takes away the courage of thinking of unusual things and prohibits self-examination above all as the most egregious of sins. It is one step away from protestantism.
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On a cold winter morning a cigar fortifies the soul.
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Every true passion thinks only of itself.
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The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.
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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.
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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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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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Life is very short, and it ought not to be spent crawling at the feet of miserable scoundrels.
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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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Politics in the middle of things of the imagination is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert.
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Wounded pride can take a rich young man far who is surrounded by flatterers since birth.
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I love her beauty, but I fear her mind.
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Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.
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Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.
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