Politics in the middle of things of the imagination is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert.
STENDHALMan is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.
More Stendhal Quotes
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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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God’s only excuse is that he does not exist.
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Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.
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One of the traits of genius is not to drag its thought through the rut worn by vulgar minds.
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Friendship has its illusions no less than love.
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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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One can acquire everything in solitude except character.
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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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Wounded pride can take a rich young man far who is surrounded by flatterers since birth.
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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 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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A very small matter, when all is said; only a fool would be concerned about it.
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The English are, I think the most obtuse and barbarous people in the world
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Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all.
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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.
STENDHAL