To seem sorrowful is not in good taste: You’re supposed to seem bored.
STENDHALOne-half, the finest half, of life is hidden from the man who does not love with passion.
More Stendhal Quotes
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I call “crystallization” that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events.
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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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Far less envy in America than in France.
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Every true passion thinks only of itself.
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I do not feel I have wisdom enough yet to love what is ugly.
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Wounded pride can take a rich young man far who is surrounded by flatterers since birth.
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But, if I sample this pleasure so prudently and circumspectly, it will no longer be a pleasure.
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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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To describe happiness is to diminish it.
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A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness.
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A man who is half an idiot, but who keeps a sharp lookout and acts prudently all his life, often enjoys the pleasure of triumphing over men of more imagination than he.
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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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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.
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Women prefer emotions to reasoning.
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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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The great majority of men, especially in France, both desire and possess a fashionable woman, much in the way one might own a fine horse – as a luxury befitting a young man.
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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.
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Beauty is nothing but a promise of happiness.
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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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People happy in love have an air of intensity.
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I think being condemned to death is the only real distinction,” said Mathilde. “It is the only thing which cannot be bought.
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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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Love is a well from which we can drink only as much as we have put in, and the stars that shine from it are only our eyes looking in.
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This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.
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Napoleon was indeed the man sent by God to help the youth of France! Who is to take his place?
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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.
STENDHAL