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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.

Stendhal

Beauty is nothing but a promise of happiness.
STENDHAL

Beautiful Happiness Promise
If you think of paying court to the men in power, your eternal ruin is assured.
STENDHAL

Assurance Court Forever Man Pay Power Ruin Thinking
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

Comparison Death Love Pay Standard Thinking True
Perhaps 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.
STENDHAL

Feeling Impression Love Man Passion Woman
One of the traits of genius is not to drag its thought through the rut worn by vulgar minds.
STENDHAL

Drag Genius Mindset Thinking Vulgar
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.
STENDHAL

Happiness People Pleasure Reading Remind Suffering
Sometimes the impact of Mozart’s music is so immediate that the vision in the mind remains blurred and incomplete, while the soul seems to be directly invaded, drenched in wave upon wave of melancholy.
STENDHAL

Blurry Direct Impact Mindset Music Sadness Time Vision
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

Cold Hungry Law Natural Need Strength Suffering
I see but one rule: to be clear.
STENDHAL

Clear Rule See
Signs cannot be represented, in a spy’s report, so damningly as words.
STENDHAL

Report Representation Word
It is from cowardice and not from want of enlightenment that we do not read in our own hearts.
STENDHAL

Coward Enlightenment Heart Ourselves Reading
Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.
STENDHAL

Feminine Himself Terrible Weapon
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.
STENDHAL

Government Habit Music Passion Race Reason
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.
STENDHAL

Emotion Ideas Judgement Life Mistake Public Shock
I call “crystallization” that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events.
STENDHAL

Action Crystal Discover Event Mindset
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

Death Fools Grief Man Ordinary Personage Powerful Procedure

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 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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Popular Authors

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