I love her beauty, but I fear her mind.
STENDHALThe 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.
More Stendhal Quotes
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Power, after love, is the first source of happiness.
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Faith, I am no such fool; everyone for himself in this desert of selfishness which is called life.
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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.
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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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Life is very short, and it ought not to be spent crawling at the feet of miserable scoundrels.
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I do not feel I have wisdom enough yet to love what is ugly.
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Spring appears and we are once more children.
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Love is like fever; it comes and goes without the will having any part of the process.
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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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Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.
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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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The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.
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Only great minds can afford a simple style.
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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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The man of genius is he and he alone who finds such joy in his art that he will work at it come hell or high water.
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Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.
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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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Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.
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Your career will be a painful one. I divine something in you which offends the vulgar.
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A very small matter, when all is said; only a fool would be concerned about it.
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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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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 am mad, I am going under, I must follow the advice of a friend, and pay no heed to myself.
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A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.
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One-half, the finest half, of life is hidden from the man who does not love with passion.
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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.
STENDHAL